The basis for The Beguiled is a novel with a setting in the American South.
 Even in the 19th century, fictional narratives in verse, such as Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824), Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin (1833), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), competed with prose novels
 Transgressive fiction from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) to Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules lmentaires (1998) pushed the boundaries, leading to the mainstream publication of explicitly erotic works such as Anne Desclos' Story of O (1954) and Anas Nin's Delta of Venus (1978)

