ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Sexual fantasy, resides in two main types of text, the pornographic and the erotic, which are notoriously difficult to separate. The different moral positions articulated with them are often the result of anxieties about the class composition of the readership and the mode of circulation, than any absolute quality of the texts themselves. Thomas Nashe's poem, 'The Choice of Valentines', written in the early 1590s, been placed on the sidelines of the literary canon, explained by characterizing 'The Choice of Valentines' as pornographic in style and subject. Such judgments depend upon a retrospective imposition of categories on texts and on suppositions about the 'proper' content of poetry than upon stylistic assessments. It is an emphatic rejection of the obfuscations of Petrarchanism and a deliberately recalled attempt to offer the blend of Latinate and English models which was central of an authoritative English poetic diction in the Renaissance.
