Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture FROM THE PUBLISHER
Although erotica has always existed, "pornography" is a recent phenomenon: as late as the eighteenth century the word did not exist. From the secret museums to the pornography trials of Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterly's Lover, to Mapplethorpe, cable TV, and the Internet, Walter Kendrick explores how conceptions of pornography relate to issues of freedom of expression and censorship. He provides, too, a fascinating portrait gallery of the jurists, artists, guardians of public morality, sleaze merchants, and civil libertarians who have played roles in the changing definitions of pornography.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Surprisingly, the word ``pornography'' is only 130 years old, and originally it meant ``a description of prostitutes or of prostitution, as a matter of public hygiene.'' In this well-researched, nontitillating study of the phenomenon, Village Voice editor Kendrick (The Novel Machine goes back to the erotic murals of ancient Pompeii and forward to the recent presidential commissions on pornography to show how public attitudes have changed. Invoking such names as Margaret Sanger, Justice Brennan, Steven Marcus, Susan Sontag, New York vice investigators Anthony Comstock and John S. Sumner, he describes the trials of birth-control advocates and publishers of such ``dirty books'' as Madame Bovary, Nana, Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover, examines the concepts of eroticism, obscenity and ``redeeming social significance'' and quotes extensively from legal opinions. Kendrick concludes that the most dismaying aspect of the ``invincingly self-righteous'' feminist anti-pornography campaign is its ``exact resemblance'' to the vigilantism of the Legion of Decency and to every such effort that preceded it. (April 23)
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