The Invention of Pornography, 1500–1800

The Invention of Pornography, 1500–1800 PDF

Author: Lynn Hunt

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 193540895X

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A collection of ten essays tracing the history and various uses of pornography in early modern Europe. In America today the intense and controversial debate over the censorship of pornography continues to call into question the values of a modern, democratic culture. This ground-breaking collection of ten critical essays traces the history and various uses of pornography in early modern Europe, offering the historical perspective crucial to understanding current issues of artistic censorship. The essays, by historians and literary theorists, examine how pornography emerged between 1500 and 1800 as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. They reveal that the first modern writers and engravers of pornography were part of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers, and libertines who constituted the dark underside of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. From the beginning, early modern European pornography used the shock of sex to test the boundaries and regulation of decent and obscene behavior and expression in the public and private spheres, criticizing and even subverting religious and political authorities as well social and sexual norms. Contents Introduction, Lynn Hunt • Humanism, Politics, and Pornography in Renaissance Italy, Paula Findlen • The Politics of Pornography: L'Ecole des filles, Joan Dejea • Sometimes a Sceptre is only a Sceptre: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England, Rachel Weil • The Materialist World of Pornography, Margaret C. Jacob • Truth and the Obscene Word in Eighteenth-Century French Pornography, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur • The Pornographic Whore: Prostitution in French Pornography from Margot to Juliette, Kathryn Norberg • Erotic Fantasy and the Libertine Dispensation in Eighteenth-Century England, Randolph Trumbach • Politics and Pornography in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic,Wijnand W. Mijnhardt • Pornography and the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt

The Invention of Pornography

The Invention of Pornography PDF

Author: Lynn Hunt

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1993-06-01

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1935408941

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In this groundbreaking collection of essays, historians and literary theorists examine how, between 1500 and 1800, pornography emerged as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. The first modern writers and engravers of pornography were part of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers, and libertines who constituted the dark underside of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. From the start, early modern European pornography used the shock of sex to test the boundaries and regulation of obscene behavior and expression in the public and private sphere. As such, pornography criticized and even subverted political authorities as well as social and sexual relations.

Porn Studies

Porn Studies PDF

Author: Linda Williams

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9780822333128

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A collection of contemporary work on pornographic film and video, edited by one of the founders of the field.

A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages

A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages PDF

Author: Ruth Evans

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1350995304

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Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II

The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II PDF

Author: Simon Burrows

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-08-09

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1441159134

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This is a rich and path-breaking comparative study of reading tastes in the final years of old regime Europe. Based on extensive research in the account books of the Swiss publishers, the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), and related archives, it charts the dissemination of literature and reading tastes across Europe in the years leading up to the French revolution. In the process, it recasts our understanding of late 18th-century print culture and the contours of the enlightenment. The fruit of a widely acclaimed five year database project, the STN database, it is also a story of pioneering efforts to apply the latest digital technology and GIS mapping techniques to traditional historical and bibliographic problems. Although written to serve as a standalone study, this book is ideally complemented by its companion volume, Mark Curran's The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I: Selling Enlightenment, which offers a radical reinterpretation of the structure and practices of the European book trade. The STN database is now recognised as a cutting-edge digital project of global significance. Robert Darnton has called it "a prodigious accomplishment and a joy to use" while Jeremy Popkin adds, "No one working in the field of French Enlightenment studies ... can afford to ignore the rich mine of data that Simon Burrows and his collaborators have made accessible, in an eminently usable form, and the new possibilities it opens up for scholars." The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I and II offer a roadmap of that data and what it can show us.

The Contradictions of Culture

The Contradictions of Culture PDF

Author: Elizabeth Wilson

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2001-03-08

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780761969754

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In this book, one of the most accomplished and thoughtful cultural commentators of the day, considers the contradictory nature of cultural relations. Elizabeth Wilson explores these themes through an examination of fashion, feminism, consumer culture, representation and postmodernism. Debates within feminism on the nature and effects of pornography are used to illustrate a particular kind of cultural contradiction. Wilson recognizes that postmodernism permitted the reappropriation of subjects that were not previously considered worthy of attention, or opposed to the idea of emancipation, chief among these was fashion. She shows that the association of an interest in this culturally significant subject with a revisionist project raises doubt

Sexy Blake

Sexy Blake PDF

Author: H. Bruder

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1137332840

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This book lays bare numerous sexy Blakes, arguing for both chastity and pornography, violence and domination as well as desire and redemption, and also journeying in the realms of conceptual sex and conceptual art. Fierce tussles over the body in, and the body of, the poet-artist's work celebrate Blakean attractions and repulsions.

Licentious Gotham

Licentious Gotham PDF

Author: Donna Dennis

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-31

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 9780674053731

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Licentious Gotham, set in the streets, news depots, publishing houses, grand jury chambers, and courtrooms of the nation's great metropolis, delves into the stories of the enterprising men and women who created a thriving transcontinental market for sexually arousing books and pictures. The experiences of fancy publishers, flash editors, and racy novelists, who all managed to pursue their trade in the face of laws criminalizing obscene publications, dramatically convey nineteenth-century America's daring notions of sex, gender, and desire, as well as the frequently counterproductive results of attempts to enforce conventional moral standards. In nineteenth-century New York, the business of erotic publishing and legal attacks on obscenity developed in tandem, with each activity shaping and even promoting the pursuit of the other. Obscenity prohibitions, rather than curbing salacious publications, inspired innovative new styles of forbidden literature--such as works highlighting expressions of passion and pleasure by middle-class American women. Obscenity prosecutions also spurred purveyors of lewd materials to devise novel schemes to evade local censorship by advertising and distributing their products through the mail. This subterfuge in turn triggered far-reaching transformations in strategies for policing obscenity. Donna Dennis offers a colorful, groundbreaking account of the birth of an indecent print trade and the origins of obscenity regulation in the United States. By revealing the paradoxes that characterized early efforts to suppress sexual expression in the name of morality, she suggests relevant lessons for our own day.