List Price: $39.95

Tags: Literature & Fiction, General AAS,

Book Description:
1st U.S. edition, book like new, clean and unmarked, dust jacket has slight shelfwear (scuffing) on rear panel and is now protected in a clear Brodart cover. By Jean Marie Goulemot. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press 1994. Publisher's statement: "This book is an original and illuminating study of erotic literature in eighteenth-century France. Approacing the erotic book as a literary genre, Goulemot suggests that in early modern France it could be found alongside accepted forms of literary practice. Books containing obscene language, scatalogical descriptions and the depiction of scenes of joyour fornication abounded, and were considered a recognized fact of cultural life. Goulemot argues that descriptions of sexual activity were the object of a healthy and well-established trade, and became ousted from the marketplace only with the arrival of a new, more codified elitist conception of art. It was at this point, under classicism, that a form of modern pornography--privately bought and secretly read--was born. Goulemot discusses the rules of production of erotic literature, its means of dissemination and modes of consumption, from the touting of prohibited books in the park of Versailles to the use of literature in waiting rooms in brothels. He examines the various narratives techniques used in erotic books, as well as the images and illustrations they contained. Forbidden texts will be of particular interest to students of literature and literary theory, cultural history and the history of the book. "