Romanticism, Materialism, and the Origins of Modern Pornography  

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Romanticism, Materialism, and the Origins of Modern Pornography (2001) is an essay by Bradford Keyes Mudge on the origins of pornography in the United Kingdom

" Coincidentally or not—and I believe not—the late 1820s and early 1830s also witnessed the emergence of another discourse of paramount interest to the modern state: pornography. Unlike obscenity, its larger and more inclusive discursive parent, "pornography" is a nineteenth-century neologism, and it refers specifically to graphic images or narratives that have been mass-produced for the sexual use of their consumers. Art historians and bibliographers might be quick to object to my chronology—with the former arguing that visual depictions of human sexuality in western culture are as old as Pompeii, and the latter arguing that Aretino's Ragionamenti, Chorier's Satyra sotadica, and Barrin's Vénus dans le Cloître appeared in 1534, 1660, and 1683 respectively." --Mudge, Bradford K. "Romanticism, Materialism, and the Origins of Modern Pornography."

On Rowlandson

"Rowlandson's sexually explicit prints1 are well-known to scholars of British Romanticism. Many were originally part of George IV's collection at Windsor Castle, and they are now scattered among various public institutions—the Library of Congress, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, to name a few—and in private collections in this country and abroad. A significant number of these prints have been reproduced and are currently available in two book-length collections, Gert Schiff's The Amorous Illustrations of Thomas Rowlandson (1969) and Kurt von Meier's The Forbidden Erotica of Thomas Rowlandson (1970), neither of which provides appropriate information either about individual prints or about the environment in which the prints originally appeared. (6) The result, however inadvertent, is that Rowlandson's work loses its historical specificity and is transformed by editorial fiat into the "amorous illustrations" or "forbidden erotica" of the title-page. Modern readers are thus asked to create a kind of "pornography" of which they themselves are the source. Scholarship has provided little assistance. From the obituary that appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1827, through all of those scholarly efforts by Joseph Grego, A. P. Oppe, Bernard Falk, Arthur Heintzelman, John Hayes, Robert Wark, John Riely, and Ronald Paulson, to the most recent books and articles, the details of history and biography yield time and again to scholarly speculation—occasionally informed, occasionally not. (7) We have, after all, only three of Rowlandson's own letters and only a handful of contemporary accounts of his colorful life. (8) On the other hand, we also have more than ten thousand drawings and prints in museums and libraries and private collections across the world. There is no other Romantic figure from whom we have so much and about whom we know so little. Bradford K. Mudge

[1]

1Pretty Little Games for Young Ladies and Gentlemen and Of some Etchings and Drawings, amatory or obscene, by Thomas Rowlandson



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