In recent years, the popular literature of the masses (so-called Trivialliteratur) has received increasing attention from literary and cultural historians, as has the response of the social elite to this form of popular culture. Yet few scholars have seriously investigated the history of what must surely be one of the most pervasive genres of mass literature: pornography. This is unfortunate since (as Steven Marcus has shown in his pioneering study of sexuality in Victorian England) the view of human sexuality that surfaces in a society's pornographic subculture is often a reflection, however distorted or reversed, of officially sanctioned attitudes toward sex. Likewise, the extent to which a society seeks to control a popular phenomenon like pornography is an indication of the fears, both conscious and unconscious, harbored toward that object; stigmatization and repression of pornographic literature helps define and uphold the authority of socially sanctioned sexual norms, while at the same time revealing something about how stable or vulnerable that society imagines its established values to be.