Lynn Hunt. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500 - 1800 New York: Zone Books, 1993. Synopsis: These essays were presented at a University of Pennsylvania conferencein 1991. The authors argue "that pornography, apart from or in addition to its erotic appeal, has a strong political meaning." (Choice) Index. Description: Includes "The Libertine Whore: Prostitution in French Pornography from Margot to Juliette" by Kathryn Norberg; "Pornography and the French Revolution" by Lynn Hunt; and "Truth and the Obscene World in Eighteenth-Century Pornography" by Lucienne Frappier-Mazur From the Publisher: In this groundbreaking collection of essays, historians and literary theorists examine how, between 1500 and 1800, pornography emerged as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. The first modern writers and engravers of pornography were part of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers and libertines who constituted the dark underside of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. From the start, early modern European pornography used the shock of sex to test the boundaries and regulation of obscene behavior and expression in the public and private sphere. As such, pornography criticized and even subverted political authorities as well as social and sexual relations. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments 7 Introduction: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 9 Pt. 1 Early Political and Cultural Meanings I Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy 49 II The Politics of Pornography: L'Ecole des Filles 109 III Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England 125 Pt. 2 Philosophical and Formal Qualities IV The Materialist World of Pornography 157 V Truth and the Obscene Word in Eighteenth-Century French Pornography 203 Pt. 3 Eighteenth-Century Vantage Points VI The Libertine Whore: Prostitution in French Pornography from Margot to Juliette 225 VII Erotic Fantasy and Male Libertinism in Enlightenment England 253 VIII Politics and Pornography in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic 283 IX Pornography and the French Revolution 301 Notes 341 Contributors 401 Index 403 Go Back.