Social criticism and medical ideas on desires' excesses: a study of novels for men from late nineteenth to early twentieth century

摘要

This article analyses the pornographic literature from the second half of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century in Brazil. Also known as reading for men or novels for men, these plots reached a singular repercussion at the time. If at first these stories, full of fantasies and desires, talked about both social and political issues, with the coming of the new century they clearly started to establish a close dialogue with current medical and scientific theories.