ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on masturbation and autoeroticism as broadly construed: both the physical acts of individual “manufriction” (as opposed to “conjugal onanism” or coitus interruptus), and the solitary self-pleasurings of fantasy, especially as these self-pleasurings are reflected in or productive of literature and the arts. It discusses seventeenth-century sexual advice manuals and their connection to the eighteenth-century emergence of anti-masturbatory pamphlets, particularly Onania. The book elaborates a notion of masturbation as a trope for the diseased woman and, more subtlely, the creative woman writer. It draws an analogy between nineteenth-century assumptions regarding masturbation and those concerning prostitution, arguing that both were construed as social rather than sexual forms of disease. The book traces the transition of masturbatory poetics from a rhetoric of illness in the naturalist novel to one of emancipation in contemporary texts.
