Domestic Architecture, Literature and the Sexual Imaginary in Europe, 1850-1930

Aina Martí-Balcells

This book sheds light on the contributions of architecture and its literary representations to a series of changes taking place in sexual culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, England, Germany and Austria. By analysing an important set of architectural discourses and literary representations of domestic architecture, the book illustrates the constant tension between an increasing sexual permissiveness and more conservative approaches to domesticity and sexuality. It shows the ways in which literature imagined the impact of new architectural designs on sexual culture that suggested the creation of more fluid forms of organisation of space and sexual mores.