A Night in a Moorish Harem

A Night in a Moorish Harem is an erotic novella anonymously written and narrated by the main character, "Lord George Herbert" in 1896. It recounts a night spent by a shipwrecked British sailor in a Moroccan harem with nine concubines of different nationalities. The harem topos is a typical example of the privileged location and also an example of Western literary orientalism.

In December 1923, two New York booksellers, Maurice Inman and Max Gottschalk, were arrested for selling A Night in a Moorish Harem and convicted in March 1924. However, by 1930, a prosecution in Chicago for selling the book failed, as did another in New York in 1931.

See also

• The Lustful Turk

References

• Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: book censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age (Print Culture History in Modern America), Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2002, ISBN 0-299-17584-7; p. 136
• Gaétan Brulotte, John Phillips, 'Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, CRC Press, 2006, ISBN 1-57958-441-1, p. 441
• Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: the trade in erotica, 1920-1940, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8122-1798-5, pp. 95, 284
• Marie-Luise Kohlke, Luisa Orza, Negotiating Sexual Idioms: image, text, performance. (At the interface/probing the boundaries; 53). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008, ISBN 90-420-2491-7, p. 69
• David Goldsmith Loth, The Erotic in Literature: a historical survey of pornography as delightful as it is indiscreet, London: Secker & Warburg, 1961, pp. 139–140
• Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: a study of sexuality and pornography in mid-nineteenth-century England, Transaction Publishers, 2008, ISBN 1-4128-0819-7, p. 268
• İrvin Cemil Schick, The Erotic Margin: sexuality and spatiality in alteritist discourse, Verso, 1999, ISBN 1-85984-732-3, pp. 200–204