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Excitable Imaginations offers a new approach to the history of
pornography. Looking beyond a counter-canon of bawdy literature,
Kathleen Lubey identifies a vigilant attentiveness to sex across a
wide spectrum of literary and philosophical texts in
eighteenth-century Britain. Esteemed public modes of writing such
as nationalist poetry, moral fiction, and empirical philosophy, as
well as scandalous and obscene writing, persistently narrate erotic
experiences desire, voyeurism, seduction, orgasm. The recurring
turn to sexuality in literature and philosophy, she argues, allowed
authors to recommend with great urgency how the risque delights of
reading might excite the imagination to ever greater degrees of
educability on moral and aesthetic matters. Moralists such as
Samuel Richardson and Adam Smith, like their licentious
counterparts Rochester, Haywood, and Cleland, purposefully evoke
salacious fantasy so that their audiences will recognize reading as
an intellectual act that is premised on visceral pleasure.
Eroticism in texts like Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,
in Lubey s reading, did not compete with instructive literary aims,
but rather was essential to the construction of the self-governing
Enlightenment subject."
What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on
forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its
nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s
paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these
texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography
is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far
more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory
to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography
always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before
anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people
are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men.
Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's
central task has historically been to expose its artifice and
envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography
refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to
connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising
take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography
transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing
the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated
as well as its plans for how to rectify them.
What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on
forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its
nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s
paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these
texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography
is-a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more
variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to
sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always
had a social consciousness-that it knew, long before
anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people
are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men.
Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's
central task has historically been to expose its artifice and
envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography
refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to
connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising
take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography
transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing
the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated
as well as its plans for how to rectify them.
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