Awards

• Winner of Named as Outstanding Academic Book by Choice.

Overview

This fresh and persuasively argued book examines the origins of pornography in Britain and presents a comprehensive overview of women's role in the evolution of obscene fiction. Carefully monitoring the complex interconnections between three related debates--that over the masquerade, that over the novel, and that over prostitution--Mudge contextualizes the growing literary need to separate good fiction from bad and argues that that process was of crucial importance to the emergence of a new, middle-class state. Looking closely at sermons, medical manuals, periodical essays, and political tracts as well as poetry, novels, and literary criticism, The Whore's Story tracks the shifting politics of pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain and charts the rise of modern, pornographic sensibilities.

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9780195135053

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Reviews

Bradford K Mudge's The Whore's Story is an important contribution to this project...a welcome addition to the literature on gender and sexuality in the period...with its thorough discussion of both familiar and obscure primary texts and its engaging readable style... --ECCB<br> The Whore's Story thus offers a new answer to the question of how writing that today is called the novel, and it sexuality as active agents-they became its subject....In spite of the large amount of literature already existing on the subject, Mudge finds new and striking examples. --Eighteenth-Century Studies<br> The Whore's Story's most valuable contribution is in widening our understanding of eighteenth-century literary are diminished from view when we privilege one set of authors, or literary techniques, over another....In the early twenty-first century we have accepted the separation of literature from pornography as 'natural.' The Whore's Story asks us to rethink this assumption and provides a provocative literary history in which to understand pornography and literature as mutually dependent, mutually generative. --The Worldsworth Circle<br> Makes an important contribution to the understanding of the genesis and historical development of pornography in 18th- and 19th-century England. The author makes the bold, yet fully persuasive, claim that women, as both literary producers and consumers, played a crucial role not only in the rise of the novel...but also in the ascendancy of pornography.... Wonderfully researched and beautifully written, this book will appeal to both students doing upper-division undergraduate work and scholars who desire a more complete picture of the development of the Britishnovel and its early cultural context. --Choice<br> A persuasively argued scholarly monograph and a good read.... Bradford Mudge's Monograph is an important study that will change our understanding of the evolution of erotic fiction. --Eighteenth Century Fiction<br>

<br> Bradford K Mudge's The Whore's Story is an important contribution to this project...a welcome addition to the literature on gender and sexuality in the period...with its thorough discussion of both familiar and obscure primary texts and its engaging readable style... --ECCB<br> The Whore's Story thus offers a new answer to the question of how writing that today is called the novel, and it sexuality as active agents-they became its subject....In spite of the large amount of literature already existing on the subject, Mudge finds new and striking examples. --Eighteenth-Century Studies<br> The Whore's Story's most valuable contribution is in widening our understanding of eighteenth-century literary are diminished from view when we privilege one set of authors, or literary techniques, over another....In the early twenty-first century we have accepted the separation of literature from pornography as 'natural.' The Whore's Story asks us to rethink this assumption and provides a provocat

A reassertion of the female ingenuity that enabled market-minded English literary fiction and its unfettered alternate to flourish.Providing context via todays struggles over pornography (a term coined only circa 1864), Mudge (Sara Coleridge, 1989) evenhandedly pits Dworkin and MacKinnons ordinances against the bottom line of performance artists such as Lydia Lunch: Reality is an X-rated trip. With bite, he explicates the late-17th-century emergence of a cash-sex-fiction nexusexploiting quack medical manuals, satires and sermons, and licentious verseto unveil how Behns high-flown Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister ripened by 1830 into Spinster Mary Wilsons forthright Whores Catechism. While masquerade entertainments provided rich opportunities for baroque prostitutes, independent women who wrote about passion for money were castigated as soulless fiends depriving the state of maternal benefits, infecting the body politic, and preying upon weak-willed men. Legal eradication failing, Defoes shrewdly conceived Moll Flanders and Roxana affected last-minute rehabilitations. Richardson undertook to reform both novel and reader by celebrating Pamela, whose virtuechastitywas richly rewarded on the marriage market (Fieldings Shamela, on the other hand, laughed). During King George IVs scabrous divorce trial, the prurient press took cunning Queen Carolines side and made a fortune. While government turned justice into entertainment, porn finished emancipating itself from literature: nowadays it is the more artistic pornography that is most likely to be brought to trial. Period prints (showcasing Rowlandson) quicken the argument, and excerpts sate curiosity about most of these backdated textual incendiaries. Only occasional jargon or excess recapitulations impede pleasure. One emerges with views enlarged: if the best things in life ought to be free, who foots the bill for censorship?A scholarly romp that furthers debate on just whose interests are served by suppressing or canonizing sexual representation. (26 b&w figures) (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Bradford K. Mudge is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado. His Sara Coleridge: A Victoria Daughter won the 1990 Choice Outstanding Book Award.

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