Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity

Examines the changing relationship between art and pornography from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Allison Pease (Author)

9780521780766, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 July 2000

262 pages, 24 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.56 kg

"Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity offers a rich addition to studies of the limits of representation and material culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. ...provocative, highly persuasive..." The Wordsworth Circle

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.

1. Civil society: aesthetics and pornography in the eighteenth century
2. Victorian obscenities: the new reading public, pornography and Swinburne's sexual aesthetic
3. The mastery of form: Beardsley and Joyce
4. Being disinterested: D. H. Lawrence
5. Modernist criticism: the battle for culture and the accommodation of the obscene.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]