This chapter explores how romance fiction can shape sexual fantasy, how it can act as a ‘machine showing desire' to channel sexual desire. Fiction can spread certain sexual comprehension and impact how certain interactions are understood, personally and socially. This chapter compares popular twentieth century ‘desert romance' fiction, stories of European women falling in love with Arab ‘sheik' characters, with real relationships between European women and Moroccan men in the twentieth century. The impact of this fiction meant that many of these women understood Moroccan men through the lens of these novels, seeking to recreate them in their personal lives.
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This essay analyses press reactions to desert romance novels alongside letters from European women to their Moroccan male lovers intercepted by the French colonial government in Morocco in the 1940s. There are marked similarities between desert romance texts and how these European women wrote about their own experiences, indicating that these texts impacted the sexual fantasies of European women and how they self-narrativized their own relationships with North African men.
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* Note that I was only able to read the beginning of this so, and I found little information elsewhere about Leonard Noel Barker so I'm unable to confirm whether or not Barker's novels have happy endings.
Here's the abstract:
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* Note that I was only able to read the beginning of this so, and I found little information elsewhere about Leonard Noel Barker so I'm unable to confirm whether or not Barker's novels have happy endings.