Erotic Encyclopedia edited by London Met Professor

John Phillips, Professor of French Literature and Culture at London Metropolitan University is the co-editor of a new book tackling the subject of Erotic Literature. The Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature (EEL) published by Routledge, is a collaboration between Professor Phillips and Gaetan Brulotte, Professor of French Literature at the University of South Florida in Tampa, USA.

Covering an international field of writers, critical approaches and general themes from prostitution to Shakespearian courtship, this book brings together for the first time all the different strands of study into one scholarly reference resource. The book is a two-volume work and over 1616 pages long. It contains over 540 entries.

Professor Phillips said: ‘The EEL is the fruit of six years collaboration between the editors, a panel of distinguished advisors and hundreds of contributors from universities all over the world. Both Gaetan and I are extremely proud of the high standard of scholarship informing the work's entries.’

In the introduction to the work, Professor Phillips explains the need for this encyclopedia: ‘In an interview in 2002, the late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida was asked, if he were to watch a documentary about a philosopher—Heidegger, Kant, or Hegel—what he would wish to see in it. He replied: "Their sex-lives…. Because it is not something they talk about."

'The intellectual tradition of the Judeo-Christian West has repressed its sex-life in much the same way as the philosophers Derrida had in mind and yet, the poets and story-tellers of West and East alike have never stopped talking about sex. This encyclopedia is the first of its kind. It is a comprehensive discussion and scholarly analysis of those innumerable works, written in many different languages throughout our known history, in which ‘sex-talk’ is the dominant discourse. The history of this discourse is as old as the history of writing itself.’

Both Professor Phillips and Professor Brulotte were featured on Playboy Radio in March. They took part in a listener phone-in broadcast across America and Canada.

This book however is not one for the giggling school boy. In a review of the work, The Times Literary Supplement wrote: ‘It takes one into some unfamiliar sexual territories - Japanese, Chinese, Arab, Zulu, Thai and Catalan. This is an exceedingly serious work of reference.’

The Encyclopedia is currently available in hard back although a paperback copy is being planned.

1 April 2008

Communications and PR Office