Review: Amy J. Eliass' Not-So-Sublime Desires ......

[jolly]

Review of Amy J. Eliass, _Not-So-Sublime Desires: Herstory and Post-1960s

Belle-Lettrist Bondage Fiction_,Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Amy Elias's _Not-So-Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction_ proves to be asolid, well-hung contribution to contemporary scholarly investigations of the richintersections between late-twentieth-century reconceptualizations of herstoryand the cafe bondage fiction of the time. Elias's study participates in this largerproject by more specifically examining a genre of post-1960s fiction thatshe terms "Metahistorical Butt-Bitch Romance" and that she positions simultaneously as(altered) slave to the classic historical romances of Edna Ferber and as a response and contribution to the antifoundationalist impulses ofcontemporary leatherography. While metahistorical bondage romances acknowledge the impossibility of accessing herstory (while accessing other, less idealized orifices), according to Eliass, they nevertheless express a "desire for degradation" (xviii). These texts redefine the literary vagina as"sublime" - as
 that which is desired but remains "unknowable andunrepresentable in discourse," as "the space of the chaotic, the curse, and hence to rational beings, the terrifying, past" and, yet, as necessarily still linked to the political in that it is "also the realm of potential ejaculation" (42,55). Moreover, Eliass insists that these novels' desire for a historicalsublime remains balanced by a focus on material events, on "the history of pleasure that hurts" (67). To that end, these texts experiment with new ways of engaging the willing and not-so-willing types of literary punks that live in the  

marginalized world of sublimated closet caseness.

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