Literature and Pornography, 1660‒1800 Page 1 of 26 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). date: 01 June 2019 Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - 1701 to 1800, Literary Studies - 1500 to 1700, Literary Studies - Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers Online Publication Date: Dec 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.001 Literature and Pornography, 1660‒1800 Hal Gladfelder Oxford Handbooks Online Abstract and Keywords This essay offers a critical overview of recent and current debates on the cultural signifi cance of erotic, obscene, and pornographic writing from the long eighteenth century. The period 1660-1800 saw a new emphasis on interiority and the individual, a restructuring of sexual and gender categories, and an increasing division between public and private. Narratives of sexual education and danger were a vehicle through which authors and readers could engage with these broad cultural changes; they also contributed to a view of sexuality as the inmost truth of the self. This essay’s first part addresses theoretical de bates over the nature of pornography and its relation to such categories as the erotic and obscene, while the second offers a history of the making of a pornographic canon, over lapping with the canons of amatory fiction and the novel. It reads this history in light of censorial anxieties over the dangers of private reading, especially for women; the threat of foreign contamination of English culture; and the use of voyeurism to penetrate the boundary separating private from public. Keywords: pornography, obscenity, sexuality, censorship, public/private divide, canon formation, amatory fiction, the novel, voyeurism, readers and reading practices 1. Introduction Writing to his fellow cleric Parson Oliver at the height of the Pamela craze in 1741, Henry Fielding’s Parson Tickletext sings the praises of Richardson’s novel in terms that equate the text to its heroine’s body. “The Thought,” he pronounces, “is every where exactly cloathed by the Expression; and becomes its Dress as roundly and as close as Pamela her Country Habit.” 1 Not seeming to notice his own bawdy double-entendre, he warms to his theme, imagining Pamela not in her country dress but out of it, “casting off the Pride of Ornament” so that, like the virgin text, she “displays” her “modest Beauty… without any Covering.” As unadorned as its enticingly unclothed heroine, Richardson’s “little Book,” stripped of all covering, “presents Images to the Reader, which the coldest Zealot cannot read without Emotion.” The precise nature of Parson Tickletext’s “Emotion” becomes