High Porn : An Unbuttoned Canon

The passing reference to "canonical High Porn" in my last post might have raised a Nimoyesque eyebrow or two, so perhaps I should expand upon it (dilate upon it, tumesce upon it...always bearing in mind the lovely impossibility of writing about sex without unintended double entendres). Here's an informal, top-of-my-head, roughly chronological list of some works I would include in an informal canon of High Pornography. The list is by no means encyclopedic (it's too Eurocentric for that; except for only a few books, it's an entirely 'western' canon) and does not imply that I like all of these works (although I recommend most of them).

• Aristophanes, Plays
• Plato, The Symposium
• Ovid, Love Poems, The Metamorphoses
• Martial, The Epigrams
• Petronius, The Satyricon
• The Arabian Nights
• The Fabliaux
• Boccaccio, The Decameron
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
• Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
• Pietro Aretino, Dialogues
• William Shakespeare, Sonnets, Pericles, Troilus and Cressida
• Lord Rochester, Complete Poems
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
• John Cleland, Fanny Hill
• Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
• Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, Justine, Juliette, 120 Days of Sodom
• Goethe, Roman Elegies, Venetian Epigrams
• William Blake, Poetry and Prose
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Christabel"
• Byron, Don Juan
• Honore de Balzac, "Sarrasine," The Girl with the Golden Eyes
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
• Anonymous, My Secret Life
• Emile Zola, Nana
• C. P. Cavafy, Complete Poems
• James Joyce, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
• D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus
• Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
• Anais Nin, Delta of Venus, Little Birds
• Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye
• Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, Funeral Rites, Miracle of the Rose, Querelle
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• Pauline Reage, The Story of O
• William Burroughs, Naked Lunch
• Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems
• Stephen Vizinczey, In Praise of Older Women
• Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
• Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint, Sabbath's Theater, The Dying Animal
• Erica Jong, Fear of Flying, How To Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses, Fanny
• Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar, Myra Breckenridge
• Norman Mailer, An American Dream, Ancient Evenings
• W. H. Auden, "The Platonic Blow"
• Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, Forbidden Colors
• Junichiro Tanizaki, The Key
• Yasunari Kawabata, House of the Sleeping Beauties
• William H. Gass, Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife
• J. G. Ballard, Crash
• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
• John Updike, Rabbit is Rich, The Witches of Eastwick, Roger's Version
• Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty
• Robert Coover, Spanking the Maid
• Harold Brodkey, "Experience," in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
• Renaud Camus, Tricks
• Mutsuo Takahashi, A Bunch of Keys: Selected Poems
• Dennis Cooper, Closer
• Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior
• Alasdair Gray, 1982 Janine
• Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher
• Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality
• Mario Vargas Llosa, In Praise of the Stepmother
• Norman Rush, Mating
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library, The Line of Beauty
• Pat Califia, Macho Sluts
• Samuel Delany, The Mad Man
• Robert Olen Butler, They Whisper
• David Lehman, ed. The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present
• Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain," in Close Range
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
• Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet
• Catherine Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M
• Mark Doty, School of the Arts