Crimes of Passion
Repräsentationen der Sexualpathologie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert
[Crimes of Passion. Representations of Sexual Pathology in the Early 20th Century]

The establishment of sexual pathology as a new scientific discipline would have been unthinkable without the arts. Due to a lack of significant empirical and statistical material, early sexologists around 1900 turned a wide range of cultural artefacts—as well as their producers—into their research laboratory. This close union between science and art on the one hand, and the broad social interest in these new insights into human sexuality—especially regarding its “deviant” or even “criminal” varieties—on the other perpetuate the sexual-pathological discourse. Its textual representation leaves its unmistakable traces in the cultural archive, almost conjuring up its cultural-scientific study.

Starting from such representations, the interdisciplinary volume Crimes of Passion explores the interferences between sexual pathology, the arts, jurisdiction, society, medicine, and psychology, with a particular focus on literary texts and practices. Thus, the volume presents current research on sexual pathology with an interest in cultural studies in all its diversity and complexity. Furthermore, its contributions from different disciplines—literary studies, historiography, sociology, art history, psychology, architecture, and philosophy—paint a differentiated picture of this dense discursive web of interrelations.