Ebook Download The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus
Get the link to download this The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus as well as begin downloading. You could really want the download soft documents of guide The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus by undertaking other tasks. And that's all done. Currently, your resort to review a publication is not constantly taking as well as carrying the book The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus almost everywhere you go. You could save the soft data in your gizmo that will never ever be far as well as read it as you like. It resembles reading story tale from your gadget after that. Currently, start to enjoy reading The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus and also get your brand-new life!
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus
Ebook Download The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus
Locate the secret to enhance the quality of life by reading this The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus This is a kind of book that you require currently. Besides, it can be your preferred book to review after having this publication The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus Do you ask why? Well, The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus is a book that has various particular with others. You may not should recognize who the writer is, exactly how well-known the job is. As sensible word, never ever judge the words from which speaks, yet make the words as your good value to your life.
Reviewing The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus is a quite valuable passion and also doing that can be gone through at any time. It implies that checking out a publication will not restrict your activity, will not require the moment to invest over, and will not spend much money. It is a very affordable as well as obtainable point to buy The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus However, keeping that really cheap thing, you could obtain something brand-new, The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus something that you never do and get in your life.
A brand-new encounter can be acquired by reading a book The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus Also that is this The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus or other book collections. We provide this publication due to the fact that you can find more points to motivate your skill as well as understanding that will make you much better in your life. It will certainly be additionally useful for the people around you. We suggest this soft documents of the book below. To recognize the best ways to obtain this book The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus, read more below.
You can locate the link that we provide in site to download and install The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus By buying the budget friendly cost as well as obtain completed downloading and install, you have finished to the initial stage to get this The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus It will be nothing when having purchased this publication and also do nothing. Review it as well as reveal it! Invest your couple of time to merely check out some sheets of page of this book The Other Victorians: A Study Of Sexuality And Pornography In Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, By Steven Marcus to check out. It is soft documents and very easy to check out any place you are. Appreciate your new habit.
Taking as his point of departure the authors, the audience, and the texts of Victorian writings on sex in general and of Victorian pornography in particular, Steven Marcus offers a startling and revolutionary perspective on the underside of Victorian culture. The subjects dealt with in The Other Victorians are not only those to have been "shocking" in the Victorian period. The way these subjects were regarded--and the way our notions of the Victorians continue to change, as the efforts of contemporary scholarship restore them to their full historical dimensions--are matters today of some surprise and wonder.
Making use, for the first time, of the extensive collection of Victoriana at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, Marcus first examines the writings of Dr. William Acton, who may be said to represent the "official views" of sexuality held by Victorian society, and of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the first and most important bibliographer-scholar of pornography. He then turns to the most significant work of its kind from the period, the eleven-volume anonymous autobiography My Secret Life. There follows an analysis of four pornographic Victorian novels--an analysis that throws an oblique but fascinating light on the classics of Victorian literature--and a review of the odd flood of Victorian publications devoted to flagellation. The book concludes with a chapter propounding a general theory of pornography as a sociological phenomenon.
With the publication of The Other Victorians, understanding of this period took a giant stride forward. Most of the writers and writings discussed by Marcus belong to Victorian sub-literature rather than to literature proper; in this way the work remains connected to a consideration of the exotic sub-literature. A brilliantly written book in its own right, this work transformed the study of the Victorian period as did no other.
- Sales Rank: #2000963 in Books
- Published on: 1974
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 294 pages
Review
Even more startling for most people, though, will be Steven Marcus's classic The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. First published in 1966, it will be reissued by Transaction in September with a new introduction by the author. This is not a book to read just because Foucault alluded to it in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, or even because Marcus was doing cultural studies well before anybody was calling it that. All duly noted, of course. But The Other Victorians is fascinating in its own right -- a riveting look at how Victorian smut reconciled desire and anxiety in a vision of insatiable excess that Marcus calls "pornotopia."
– Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed
About the Author
Steven Marcus is the author of Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey and Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis and editor of The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud. His work has appeared in many periodicals, including Commentary, The New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and The New Statesman.
�
Steven Marcus is the author of Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey and Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis and editor of The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud. His work has appeared in many periodicals, including Commentary, The New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and The New Statesman.
�
Most helpful customer reviews
36 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
CAUSING GRIEVOUS BODILY PLEASURE
By DAVID BRYSON
This is a study of pornography in Victorian England. It gave rise to considerable comment when it was first published 40 years ago. It seems to be largely forgotten now, and while I was surprised to find it had not been given a previous notice here I reflected that if my eye had not lit on it by chance in a second-hand bookshop a couple of weeks ago I myself would never have read it to this day. Steven Marcus is or was a professor of English at Columbia. He has written a book on Dickens, but his area of specialisation also includes Freud. Equipped, therefore, with this eminently relevant background he acceded to persuasion, he tells us, to illuminate a murky chapter in English letters, and it seems to me that he has made rather a good job of it.
I trust it hardly needs saying that this is a serious work of scholarship and analysis, not some nudge-nudge production. By `serious' I don't mean or imply that it is solemn. Marcus has a very nice turn of academic sarcasm at times, and I treasure a few gems such as `There is about as little truth in this description as is compatible with the laws of probability'. A sense of humour and a sense of the ridiculous are needed to deal with a topic like this in a satisfactory way, and the author either is or puts up a good show of being a well-adjusted, emotionally balanced and admirably rational human being who has been able to evaluate what the human, or at least the human male, sexual experience amounts to. Pornography seems to be almost entirely written by men for men. A certain amount of the material that Marcus uses as illustration is written in a female persona, but this is usually a pretext for male self-reassurance with the putative women thrilled and amazed at the wondrous male body. A certain amount more is written from the male perspective, but again this seems to be largely concerned with the pornographer's concern to reinforce his estimate, be it actual or hopeful, of his own effectiveness. Such writers claim intimate acquaintance with far more female bodies than it has been my own good fortune to experience, but one really striking feature seems to be basic ignorance of some of the elements of female anatomy - indeed also of their own male anatomy it sometimes seemed to me. Such is the mesmeric power of fantasy, it would appear.
The book is very well put together, and very clear about what topics it wants to address. Marcus begins with three particular works that deserve detailed comment in their own right, and he proceeds via some minor efforts that typify other aspects of the genre to the sort of thing one expects and demands in a serious and professional study - the origins of this kind of writing, its style and the significance of its vocabulary and idiom, the light it sheds on the world it took place in, its relevance to his own era, and, finally and very properly, some generalised reflections of his own regarding sexuality. The obvious place to begin was with Dr William Acton. From what Marcus tells me, Acton's study of prostitution seems surprisingly sympathetic and perceptive. His more generalised study of sexuality is, sadly, something else. In the first place it more or less ignores the entire female sex, and in the second it invites mockery and ridicule for its Victorian attitudes and myths. Masturbation was a cause of not only blindness and madness, one gathers, but also potentially of bankruptcy, so the wonder is not only how the human race survived at all but also how a modern economy can have developed. However behind this absurdity what stares out at us is fear of and disgust at the sexual process in general. This, as I read the book, is the distinctively Victorian side of things. Part of the Zeitgeist was an official culture of cant and hypocrisy, and one does not have to be a professor of English at Columbia to read that loud and clear in Dickens and Thackeray. As a reaction, a subversive counter-culture arose, created and exploited by those with enough money, but with elements of downright courage and defiance too. If the culture demanded official reticence on matters sexual, those matters didn't go away, they went underground and they developed a thrill of the forbidden in the process. Writing in the 60's Marcus is still able to see this continuing into his own time, but in the 50's his depiction of the Victorian scene was virtually unchanged in some quarters. One might be taught by celibate prelates in a claustrophobic atmosphere of guilt-trips and threats of damnation, and even teenagers commonly got the idea was sex per se was best avoided, at least until marriage, in which approved state it was permissible only for procreation. These days the prelates have lost much of their authority and not only because of lapses in celibacy, as much because a lot of what they taught seems mediaeval nonsense, but the awkwardness and embarrassment surrounding sexual matters was far from neutralised by the liberated 60's. In Arthur C Clarke's The City and the Stars human beings are not reproduced sexually but by a computer, and the sexual act remains only as recreation not procreation. It may be some ultimately desirable goal, but it is a thousand million years off.
In his more general observations Marcus strikes me as sound and perceptive, at least in those where I have any interest in what he is saying. He quotes D H Lawrence as saying that pornography is never entirely pornographic, which may be true for all I would know. However Marcus quotes several works in extenso, and these entirely pornographic sequences confirm for me his interesting remarks about the vocabulary - it is only minimally verbal, more a speech-act as the linguistic philosophers used to say, until it has latterly lost even that functionality as the 4-letter words have degenerated into mere punctuation in vulgar utterance. I shall not even try to assess the professor's learned forays into either psychoanalysis or literary criticism, because these are both fields where my attention wanders more than somewhat - I genuinely pick up some perceptions that strike me as valid and significant, others seem contrived to me, and most often of all I just wouldn't be knowing one way or the other. On the other hand my own limitations do not prevent me from agreeing thoroughly with his finding that with Freud, for the first time in human history, it became possible to discuss sexuality in a neutral way. As for his intriguing conclusion of his own, namely that society, like individuals, may be passing through an adolescent phase - well, you never know. I don't understand how this book has lapsed into obscurity as it has.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Behind The Mask of Victorian Repression
By Chris Ward
Marcus' study of the underbelly of the staid and proper Victorian era is a fascinating look at the rampant pornography, prositution, and licentiousness that bubbled up behind the scenes. Quoting liberally from the writings of Henry Spencer Ashbee (generally ceded to be the author of "My Secret Life"-- Marcus has his doubts) and others, he exposes the boisterous and life-affirming erotic life that sprang up in spite of (because of?) the deeply inhibited society of the time. For those with an interest in Victorian sociology or literature, this will prove a valuable read.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
The Other Victorians
By John Grossman
An excellent, thoroughly researched work on Victorian sexuality that has been poorly known prior to this book. Those large Victorian famiiies didn't just happen. And repressed ideas about sex had to find an outlet somehow, and did.
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus PDF
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus EPub
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus Doc
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus iBooks
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus rtf
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus Mobipocket
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, by Steven Marcus Kindle
