What makes a bad choice irresistible? In brilliantly original history, Clement Knox offers new insight into the art and history, legality, politics and literature of seduction. If sex has generally been agreed a private matter, seduction has always been of intense public interest. Whether the stuff of front-page tabloid news, the scandal of nineteenth-century American courts, or the heart and soul of the literature across the eras, we are fascinated by stories of temptation and resistance, seduction and sex. In the first history of its kind, Clement Knox explores seduction in all its historical and cultural incarnations.Knox's history moves from the Garden of Eden to the medieval traditions of courtly love, to the carnivals of eighteenth-century Venice, and the bawdy world of Georgian London. Along the way we meet Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter Mary Shelley and her friend Caroline Norton and reckon with their fight for women's rights and freedom. We encounter Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world, who became entangled in America's labyrinthine and racialized seduction laws. We discover how tall tales of predatory vampires, hypnotists, and immigrants were mobilized by Nazis and nativists to help propel them to power. We consider how after seduction seemingly vanished from view during the Sexual Revolution it exploded back into our lives as The Game became a multi-million bestseller, online dating swept the world, and the ongoing male fascination with manipulating women was exposed.In a big-thinking, cultural history told through an extraordinary range of stories and sources, Knox explores how our ideas about desire and pursuit have developed in step with the modern world. This is a bold, modern charter of seduction, from Zeus' wandering eyes, to the explosion of romantic literature, and right up to the contemporary flashpoints of incel' culture and #MeToo.
