Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T04:12:24.120Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael Gamer
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 5 , October 1999 , pp. 1043 - 1054
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Modem Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Baker, David, Reed, Isaac, and Jones, Stephen, eds. Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse. Vol. 1, part 2. London, 1812. 3 vols.Google Scholar
Califia, Pat. Macho Sluts. Boston: Alyson, 1988.Google Scholar
Clery, E. J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 1817. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Engell, James and Bate, W. Jackson. Vol. 7. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Letters. Ed. Griggs, Earl Leslie. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71.Google Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Rev. of The Monk, by Matthew G. Lewis. Critical Review 19 (1797): 194–200.Google Scholar
Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Daniel, George. The Modern Dunciad, Virgil in London and Other Poems. London: Pickering, 1835.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32.Google Scholar
de Vries, Leonard, and Fryer, Peter, eds. Venus Unmasked: A Collection of Eighteenth-Century Bawdry. New York: Stein, 1967.Google Scholar
Foxon, David. Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745. New York: University, 1965.Google Scholar
Gamer, Michael. “Marketing a Masculine Romance: Scott, Antiquarianism, and the Gothic.” Studies in Romanticism 32 (1993): 523–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halttunen, Karen. “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture.” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 303–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haworth, H. E. “‘The Virtuous Romantics‘—Indecency, Indelicacy, Pornography and Obscenity in Romantic Poetry.” Papers on Language and Literature 10 (1974): 287–306.Google Scholar
Hoff, Joan. “Why Is There No History of Pornography?” The Dilemma of Violent Pornography. Ed. Gubar, Susan and Hoff, . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 17–46.Google Scholar
Hogle, Jerrold. “The Ghost of the Counterfeit—and the Closet—in The Monk.” Romanticism on the Net 8 (1997). 18 May 1999 <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/ghost.html>.Google Scholar
Hunt, Lynn. Introduction. Hunt, Invention 9-45.Google Scholar
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800. New York: Zone, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, Lynn. “Pornography and the French Revolution.” Hunt, Invention 301-39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Kappeler, Susanne. The Pornography of Representation. Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 1986.Google Scholar
Kearney, Patrick J. A History of Erotic Literature. London: Macmillan, 1982.Google Scholar
Kearney, Patrick J. The Private Case. London: Landesman, 1981.Google Scholar
Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture. New York: Viking, 1987.Google Scholar
Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Lewis, Matthew G. Adelmorn the Outlaw. London: Bell, 1801.Google Scholar
Lewis, Matthew G. The Monk. London: Bell, 1796.Google Scholar
MacKinnon, Catherine. Only Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.Google Scholar
MacKinnon, Catherine. Towards a Feminist Theory of State. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians: A Study in Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England. New York: Basic, 1966. New York: Bantam, 1967.Google Scholar
Mathias, T. J. The Pursuits of Literature. London: Becket, 1794-97. 8th ed. Dublin: P. Byrne, 1798.Google Scholar
Medwin, Thomas. Conversations with Lord Byron. London: Colburn, 1824.Google Scholar
Michelson, Peter. Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity. New York: State U of New York, 1993.Google Scholar
Miles, Robert. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.Google Scholar
Parreaux, André. The Publication of The Monk: A Literary Event, 1796-1798. Paris: Didier, 1960.Google Scholar
Paulson, Ronald. “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution.” ELH 48 (1981): 532–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peck, Louis. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1961.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R. v. Read. 2 Mod. Rep. 142. 1708.Google Scholar
Robertson, Fiona. Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.Google Scholar
Robertson, Geoffrey. Obscenity: An Account of Censorship Laws and Their Enforcement in England and Wales. London: Weidenfeld, 1979.Google Scholar
Robinson, M. E., ed. The Wild Wreath. London, 1804.Google Scholar
Ross, Marlon. “Scott's Chivalric Pose: The Function of Metrical Romance in the Romantic Period.” Genre 18 (1986): 267–97.Google Scholar
Rousseau, G. S. “The Sorrows of Priapus: Anticlericalism, Homosocial Desire, and Richard Payne Knight.” Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment. Ed. Rousseau, and Porter, Roy. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. 101–53.Google Scholar
Scott, Walter. “Essay upon Imitations of the Ancient Ballad.” Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Ed. Henderson, T. F. Vol. 4. Edinburgh: Oliver, 1932. 1-58. 4 vols.Google Scholar
Scott, Walter. Rev. of The Fatal Revenge, by Dennis Jasper Murphy. Quarterly Review 3 (1810): 339–48. Rpt. in Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Vol. 18. Edinburgh: Cadell, 1835. 157-72. 28 vols. 1834-36.Google Scholar
Thomas, Donald. A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England. New York: Praeger, 1969.Google Scholar
Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Trans. Porter, Catherine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Trumbach, Randolph. “Erotic Fantasy and Male Libertinism in Enlightenment England.” Hunt, Invention 253-82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuite, Clara. “Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, the Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk.” Romanticism on the Net 8 (1997). 18 May 1999 <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/closet.html>.Google Scholar
Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilberforce, Robert Isaac, and Wilberforce, Samuel. The Life of William Wilberforce. Vol. 2. London: Murray, 1838. 5 vols.Google Scholar
Wilson, Margaret Baron. The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis. Vol. 1. London: Colburn, 1839. 2 vols.Google Scholar