This is a shelf across four centuries of notable writing about sadomasochism, or with BDSM in it. Fiction and nonfiction are both here. Film and video are not. The dates are publication years, and the point of the shelf is how these books shaped later talk about flagellation, dominance, submission, leather, and erotic cruelty. Where a title says school or young, as with the 1876 book The Convent School, only the title and year are recorded. There is no plot. The readers of this list are adults. It is not sexual content about minors.
From the seventeenth century to Sade
The seventeenth-century entries are Jin Ping Mei (1610), the Latin treatise De Usu Flagrorum (1639), The Carnal Prayer Mat (1693), and the Zhang Zhupo edition of Jin Ping Mei (1695). In the eighteenth century: Fanny Hill (1749), Fashionable Lectures (1750), then the cluster around the Marquis de Sade. The 120 Days of Sodom is 1785, Justine is 1791, Aline and Valcour and Philosophy in the Bedroom are 1795, and Juliette is 1797. Those Sade books turn on philosophical libertinage, confinement, and eroticized cruelty. Later centuries treated that cluster as the classical engine of what got called sadism.
Victorian flagellation and the word masochism
Nineteenth-century titles: The Lustful Turk (1828), Exhibition of Female Flagellants (1830), The Romance of Chastisement (1866). Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870) is the namesake text for masochism. The Romance of Lust is 1873. The 1876 title The Convent School, or Early Experiences of A Young Flagellant stays on the shelf as a title and a year, with no plot. Then Experimental Lecture (1878), The Whippingham Papers (1887), Gynecocracy (1893), which means rule by women and is not a medical specialty, and in 1899 The Memoirs of Dolly Morton and The Torture Garden. The Victorian flagellation books are what kept the English birch fantasy in print for collectors and historians.
Twentieth-century landmarks and community politics
Twentieth-century entries start with Sadopaideia (1907) and The Way of a Man with a Maid (1908). The maid in that title is a woman servant, not a child. Belle de Jour is 1928, Sweet Gwendoline is 1947, and Shira is 1948. The key year 1954 has both Nights of Horror and Story of O. Story of O is a mid-century landmark. The Image is 1956. Gor and Isabella are 1966. Gravity’s Rainbow is 1973. Imaginative Sex is 1974. Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery is 1975. Nine and a Half Weeks and Spectator Magazine are 1978.
Coming to Power (1981) and Against Sadomasochism (1982) are the community’s political argument with itself. In 1983, The Piano Teacher and The Sleeping Beauty Quartet. The Sleeping Beauty Quartet is not a lesbian SM anthology. That slot belongs to Coming to Power and to Macho Sluts. Then 1982, Janine (1984), Exit to Eden (1985), and Macho Sluts (1988), a lesbian SM collection. Something Leather is 1990, The Ties That Bind is 1993, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature is 1994, The River Ophelia is 1995, and A Defence of Masochism is 1998. By then the shelf has split three ways: high literature, underground erotica, and books that spell out community politics, including feminist arguments for SM and against it.
After 2000
Kushiel’s Legacy is the 2001 series. Snakes and Earrings is 2003, Terminal Avenue is 2004, and L’Étudiante is 2007. The Marketplace series (2010) is serial slave-contract fiction. The Fifty Shades of Grey series (2011) is the mass-market phenomenon. Beside it sit Japanese SM novels and graphic work such as Sunstone.
