Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“Pornography is a limited genre but it has much to tell us about the modern period, during which it has simultaneously been transformed from a tool of political propaganda in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a private sexual practice in the nineteenth and twentieth,and from a limited circulation amongst elite circles to ever more widely distributed forms of magazines, photographs, and Internet web sites. What this book will make clear is that, whether or not an individual has ever looked at or read a pornographic text, he or she has felt its impact in untold ways” (xv) "Those whose primary interest is obscenity law would be better served by the bibliography, which includes works such as Edward De Grazia’s Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (1992) and Geoffrey Robertson’s Obscenity: An Account of Censorship Laws and their Enforcement in England and Wales (1979). Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity serves as a crucial review for those less familiar with applications of Kantian aesthetic theory, as Pease ensures that it remains present throughout the text, even in its continuously varying interpretations by British artists and critics." --Jamie Kathryn Gandy |
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Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (2000) by Allison Pease.
From the publisher
- 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 onward, focusing especially on the way in which early twentieth-century writers incorporated a sexually explicit discourse into their work. The book considers the work of Swinburne, Joyce and Lawrence and artist Aubrey Beardsley within the framework of a wide-ranging account of aesthetic theory beginning with Kant and concluding with F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot.
See also
