Abstract: This article presents various aspects of Casanova’s erotic writing, focusing mainly on the Story of my life. The article analyses Casanova’s metadiscourse (particularly his prefaces and his letters, which outline a first theorisation of his erotic writing and its effects on the reader) in relation to some episodes of the Memoirs. A careful reading of the Story of my life leads us to identify some of the main contradictions and specificities of Casanova’s erotic writing: the role of the reader, the relationship between suggestion and description, the issue of obscenity, etc.
