Critical Essay | Critical Essay by T. Walter Herbert

Critical Essay by T. Walter Herbert

SOURCE: Herbert, T. Walter. “Pornographic Manhood and The Scarlet Letter.” Studies in American Fiction 29, no. 1 (spring 2001): 113-20.

In the following essay, Herbert connects the emergence of pornography as a nineteenth-century genre with the emergence of a new definition of manhood.

In “The Invention of Pornography” Lynn Hunt describes the genre as a social creation that is defined collaboratively by those who produce it and those who try to stamp it out. Lists of forbidden titles in pre-revolutionary France form a canon, in which erotic books—like Therese Philosophe—are mingled together with a general run of works deemed treasonable and seditious: attacks on the ancien regime routinely accused clerics and great lords of sexual depravity, and some titles offered graphic descriptions of their lewd behavior.¹ A new form of illicit sexual writing emerged in the nineteenth century, however, in keeping with the emerging middle-class pre-occupation with the sacredness of...
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