Kathleen Lubey – författare

The four-volume set provides a compendium of rare primary sources focusing on pornography in nineteenth-century Britain for students and scholars alike. The collection contains police records, criminal trial accounts, social purity files and clippings, catalogues, advertisements, parliamentary debates, bibliographic information produced during the period, and hard to find original pornographic publications. These sources can be used individually and in combination to historicise the emergence of pornography and investigate the aspects of society that it illuminates. Despite its current cultural impact, pornography has a surprisingly short history. The Oxford English Dictionary notes usage of the term only as far back as 1824, but something can exist before a term arises to define it. Before pornography as a term emerged, the categories of obscenity and indecency were used to prosecute erotic materials that would be disruptive to the social order. Over the course of the nineteenth century, pornography emerged from a philosophic tradition that emphasized liberalism. Satirists, printers, writers, and publishers connected liberty in sexuality with liberty in politics. Alongside the radical milieu came the development of scientific pornography. Both science and pornography fed the need for information about sexuality but the margins between the two remained ambiguous and much contested in the nineteenth century. After the mid-century mark, the growth of consumer culture allowed for the deepening of an elite market for the rich and a separate market for the masses. While Britain’s global reach expanded outwards, mass pornography made for and about the poor materialized based upon industrialization and the development of urban working-class culture. Both the elite and mass markets built off and eroticized modernizing gender ideals and new sexual identities. Finally, new technologies like photography and stereolithography allowed for an eventual emphasis on the visual form. Visual pornography remained subsidiary to erotic texts in the nineteenth century, but the kernel of the triumph of the visual began in the period. With these changes, pornography emerged as both a word and a concept. Pornography proves key to understanding some of the main attractions of the modern world. The pornography of the period documents how people imagined sexuality in their changing society. It thus forms a record that can be used to investigate people’s fantasies about self and others, about emergent identities, about sexual desires, about the pleasures of wealth and power. It shows their assumptions about bodies, about social class, race, and gender. And it demonstrates the battles that took place over the articulation of those fantasies. These volumes provide primary sources that give scholars and students a starting point to explore these shifts and how the historic context shaped ideas of sexuality at every level.

This volume provides background texts for the early modern origins of pornography including its philosophic and literary foundations. By the early nineteenth-century, pornographic publications came out of the radical milieu during the global age of revolutions. In England, publishers wrote political philosophy and pornography in tandem. The age of revolutionary pornography ended in the 1860s, when William Dugdale, the doyen of them all, died in prison, sentenced to hard labour for obscenity. The volume documents radical publishers including their publications, their trade records, their arrest records, their court trials, and their political goals. It also includes materials from the Society for the Suppression of Vice and other early attempts to limit obscenity and vice.

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.

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.

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 risqué 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.