Novels as Social Media: How Literature Helped Shape Notions of Sexual Liberation

Abstract

In the historiography of sexual liberation, the role of cultural artefacts like novels and films has either been taken for granted or not received much attention at all. This article discusses these cultural dimensions of sexual liberation,using the Netherlands as a case study, arguing that these dimensions are important to research in order to better understand the (self-)fashioning of a sexually liberated subject. The seemingly close ties between literature and societal transformations in the sixties is remarkable and points to the function of literature in the 1945–1980 period, when novels functioned as an important social platform for broaching moral controversies and articulated seminal cultural repertoires for identity construction.The article analyses the ways literature functions in Dutch cultural memory of the sexual revolution nowadays, and looks at the specific historical constellation and literary culture that provided important channels for the spreading of new ideas in the 1960s. Guiding questions to investigate the specificities of this literary culture and its function in articulating and disseminating notions of sexual liberation are:what are the functions ascribed to writers and their works in sexual transformations of the 1960s/70s? To what extent are these transformations captured in terms of national identity, or do they travel across national borders? What role do they play in cultural memory, nationally and internationally?