Alice in Pornoland
Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic
by Laura Helen Marks
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Pub Date Oct 17 2018 | Archive Date Nov 02 2018
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Description
The unquenchable thirst of Dracula. The animal lust of Mr. Hyde. The acquiescence of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Victorian literature--with its overtones of prudishness, respectability, and Old World hypocrisy--belies a subverted eroticism. The Victorian Gothic is monstrous but restrained, repressed but perverse, static but transformative, and preoccupied by gender and sexuality in both regressive and progressive ways.
Laura Helen Marks investigates the contradictions and seesawing gender dynamics in Victorian-inspired adult films and looks at why pornographers persist in drawing substance and meaning from the era's Gothic tales. She focuses on the particular Victorianness that pornography prefers, and the mythologies of the Victorian era that fuel today's pornographic fantasies. In turn, she exposes what porning the Victorians shows us about pornography as a genre.
A bold foray into theory and other forbidden places, Alice in Pornoland reveals how modern-day Victorian Gothic pornography constantly emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates issues of gender, sexuality, and race.
Laura Helen Marks is a professor of practice in the Department of English at Tulane University.
Advance Praise
"A giddy pleasure to read the
future of porn studies unfolding in these pages."--Celine Parreñas
Shimizu, author of The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing
Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
"Laura Helen Marks offers a persuasive exploration of the complexities of
porn’s love affair with all things Victorian, particularly the fantasy
invocations and reimaginings of Gothic sexualities. Her account moves across
the pornographic genre and its seeming obsession with the earlier historical
period in order to open some very contemporary concerns about sex, desires and
technology."--Clarissa Smith, coauthor of Studying Sexualities:
Theories, Representations, Cultures
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780252083853 |
| PRICE | $24.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 240 |
Links
Featured Reviews
Corinne C, Reviewer
I'm writing this review having not finished the book - because this is an academic text. And I don't know many people that can sit and read an actual academic text in one sitting!
This text requires a chapter by chapter digestion, and explores the themes of pornography viewed and correlated to the Victorian lens. It is sourced and informative, and I shall enjoy very much reading the arguments the author makes.
Pornography is an inherently interesting sociological study, and this book is something I would happily recommend to someone that wants to explore pornography as sociology, though I would perhaps suggest it is not for beginners of academic texts, and some prior knowledge of media studies and sociology and sex and gender studies might be advisable.
This is a positive addition to a feminist school of thought on a heretofore taboo subject and I am happy to have it in my academic library.
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