A Night in a Moorish Harem

A Night in a Moorish Harem is an erotic novella written by "Lord George Herbert" at some time around 1900. 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 (Marcus's "pornotopia") 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
• Erotic literature

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 0299175847; p. 136
• Gaétan Brulotte, John Phillips, Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, CRC Press, 2006, ISBN 1579584411, p. 441
• Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: the trade in erotica, 1920-1940, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, ISBN 0812217985, 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 9042024917, 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 1412808197, p. 268
• İrvin Cemil Schick, The Erotic Margin: sexuality and spatiality in alteritist discourse, Verso, 1999, ISBN 1859847323, pp. 200–204