Synopsis
How did explicit sexual representation become acceptable in the twentieth century as art rather than pornography? Allison Pease answers this question by tracing the relationship between aesthetics and obscenity from the 1700s onwards, highlighting the way in which early twentieth-century writers incorporated a sexually explicit discourse into their work. Pease explores how artists such as Swinburne, Aubrey Beardsley, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence were responsible for shifting the boundaries between aesthetics and pornography that first became of intellectual interest in the eighteenth-century and reinforced class distinctions. Her analysis of canonical works, such as Joyce's Ulysses and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, is framed by a wide-ranging examination of the changing conceptions of aesthetics from Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Kant to F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot. Based on extensive archival work, the book includes examples of period art and illustrations which eloquently demonstrate the shift in public taste and tolerance.

First Sentence
As aesthetic philosophy emerged and created the modern notion of the art object in the eighteenth century, so pornography as we understand it today came into prominence in the Age of Reason. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
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Literary studies: general
English
British Isles
20th Century English Literature
20th century
Aesthetics
Beardsley, Aubrey
English literature
English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Erotic literature, English
General
Great Britain
History and criticism
Joyce, James
Lawrence, D. H
Literary Criticism
Literature
Modernism (Literature)
Special Subjects In Literature
Swinburne, Algernon Charles


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