The Secret Museum
Subtitle: Pornography in Modern Culture
Contributors: Steve Renick (Designer)
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: February 6, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780520207295
Subjects: Cultural studies; Pornography & obscenity; Social history; World history; World - General; Pornography (Social Aspects); Sociology; Literary Criticism; Pornography; History / General; History
Description: Although erotica has always existed, "pornography" is a recent phenomenon: as late as the eighteenth century the word did not exist. From the secret museums to the pornography trials of Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterly's Lover, to Mapplethorpe, cable TV, and the Internet, Walter Kendrick explores how conceptions of pornography relate to issues of freedom of expression and censorship.

He provides, too, a fascinating portrait gallery of the jurists, artists, guardians of public morality, sleaze merchants, and civil libertarians who have played roles in the changing definitions of pornography.