This issue of Mosaic considers the carnality of love and the ways in which the act of loving, or “love-making,” has been examined in literature from Greek society to the Marquis de Sade to contemporary Canadian poetry. Brigid Brophy asks the guiding question: why has sex, yet not violence, been censured in Western society? Through studies of Victorian fashion, homiletics, and Surrealist writing, disparate considerations of this question illuminate literature’s role in enforcing or destabilizing social and cultural orientations toward the erotic.