"Lutz, a professor of Victorian literature and culture at Long Island University, explores that era as one of sexual and erotic experimentation.... Artists and writers produced sexually themed writing and painting that unsettled Victorians by evincing radical ideas about sexual freedom, women's rights, and religious doubt. Rossetti brought sensuality to his paintings of sickness and death. His devout yet daring sister Christina's work reforming prostitutes inspired her own lush sensual verse ... and Algernon Charles Swinburne published verse on hermaphrodites, bisexuals, sexual sadists, incest, and the femme fatale, and loved being flogged by prostitutes dressed as schoolmasters and mistresses.... This is a perceptive, thorough assessment of Victorian erotica and those defiant ones who crafted it."—Publishers Weekly