The traffic in obscenity from Byron to Beardsley : sexuality and exoticism in nineteenth-century print culture / Colette Colligan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Colligan, Colette, 1974-

Series:

Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Erotic literature, English--19th century--History and criticism.

Erotic literature, English.

Erotic prints--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Erotic prints.

Pornography--Social aspects--Great Britain--19th century.

Pornography.

Pornography--Social aspects.

History.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

xiii, 236 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Summary:

Colette Colligan offers an original and compelling examination of obscenity in nineteenth-century British print culture. While carefully following its most significant commercial, legal, and discursive formations in the period, she argues that nineteenth-century obscenity was caught up in the global cultural traffic of print technology, international trade, and exoticism. Her stylish introduction, together with her thoroughly researched four main case studies, offers a unique juxtaposition of nineteenth-century authors, publications, imagery, and events, both well-known and underground. Escaping the limitations of dominant histories and theories of nineteenth-century obscenity governed by notions of 'The Other Victorians', she reveals that obscenity intersected majority and minority culture, circulated from the farthest reaches of empire back to the metropolis, searched out new print and visual media, and built commercial and fantasmatic global networks for its continuation and survival. This study also proposes that the nineteenth-century emergence of obscenity as a transnational trade dispersed across media, markets, and borders has lasting implications on present-day fears and fantasies of its relentless circulation in diverse media environments. The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley is a major contribution to the field of nineteenth-century literature and culture as well as interdisciplinary obscenity studies.

Contents:

1 The Traffic in Obscenity 1

2 An 'extensive traffic': the print trade in nineteenth-century British obscenity 9

2 Harems and London's Underground Print Culture 23

1 The unruly copies of Byron's Don Juan: harems, popular print culture, and the age of mechanical reproduction 24

2 Harem novels: the Lustful Turk to Moslem Erotism 45

3 Sir Richard Burton, the Arabian Nights, and Arab Sex Manuals 56

1 'Esoteric pornography': Sir Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights 58

2 'A race of born pederasts': 'Pederasty', The Perfumed Garden, and The Scented Garden 73

3 Collecting British obscenity: Marriage - Love and Woman Amongst the Arabs and The Old Man Young Again 87

4 The English Vice and Transatlantic Slavery 96

1 The prurient gaze: the flogged slave woman among British abolitionists 97

2 Slavery obscenity in the 1880s: William Lazenby's The Pearl and The Cremorne 104

3 Slavery obscenity at the turn-of-the-century: Dolly Morton to White Women Slaues 114

4 Whipping in the twentieth century: the fugitive image 122

5 Japanese Erotic Prints and Late Nineteenth-Century Obscenity 125

1 The traffic in Japanese erotic prints 126

2 Aubrey Beardsley's libidinal line: Japonisme, Art Nouveau, and obscenity 129

3 Japanese prostitution: Amorous Adventures of a Japanese Gentleman to Yoshiwara: The Nightless City 162

Coda: The Obscenity of the Real 169.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230003439

0230003435

OCLC:

69732447