''A Night in a Moorish Harem'' is an
erotic novella published in 1896 under the pseudonym "Lord George Herbert". It is written in the first person in the persona of a shipwrecked British sailor, recounting the night he spent in a Moroccan
harem
Harem ( Persian: حرمسرا ''haramsarā'', ar, حَرِيمٌ ''ḥarīm'', "a sacred inviolable place; harem; female members of the family") refers to domestic spaces that are reserved for the women of the house in a Muslim family. A har ...
with nine
concubine
Concubinage is an interpersonal and sexual relationship between a man and a woman in which the couple does not want, or cannot enter into a full marriage. Concubinage and marriage are often regarded as similar but mutually exclusive.
Concubi ...
s of different nationalities. The
literary topos
In classical Greek rhetoric, topos, ''pl.'' topoi, (from grc, τόπος "place", elliptical for grc, τόπος κοινός ''tópos koinós'', 'common place'), in Latin ''locus'' (from ''locus communis''), refers to a method for developing ar ...
of the harem has been classified by some as a typical example of Western literary
orientalism.
In December 1923, two New York booksellers, Maurice Inman and Max Gottschalk, were arrested for selling ''
A Night in a Moorish Harem'' and convicted in March 1924. However, by 1930, a prosecution in Chicago for selling the book failed, as did another in New York in 1931.
See also
*''
The Lustful Turk
''The Lustful Turk, or Lascivious Scenes from a Harem'' is a pre- Victorian British exploitation erotic epistolary novel first published anonymously in 1828 by John Benjamin Brookes and reprinted by William Dugdale. However, it was not widely kno ...
''
References
*
Paul S. Boyer, ''Purity in Print: book censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age'' (Print Culture History in Modern America), Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2002, ; p. 136
*
Gaétan Brulotte, John Phillips, Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature'', CRC Press, 2006, , p. 441
* Jay A. Gertzman, ''Bookleggers and Smuthounds: the trade in erotica, 1920-1940'', University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, , pp. 95, 284
* Marie-Luise Kohlke, Luisa Orza, ''Negotiating Sexual Idioms: image, text, performance''. (At the interface/probing the boundaries; 53). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008, , p. 69
* David Goldsmith Loth, ''The Erotic in Literature: a historical survey of pornography as delightful as it is indiscreet'', London: Secker & Warburg, 1961, pp. 139–140
*
Steven Marcus, ''The Other Victorians: a study of sexuality and pornography in mid-nineteenth-century England'', Transaction Publishers, 2008, , p. 268
* İrvin Cemil Schick, ''The Erotic Margin: sexuality and spatiality in alteritist discourse'', Verso, 1999, , pp. 200–204
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Night In A Moorish Harem, A
British erotic novels
English novels
Works published under a pseudonym
1896 British novels