Invention

Definition

An invention is a novel device or technique. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention [Oct 2004]

The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (1993) - Lynn Hunt

The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (1993) - Lynn Hunt [Amazon.com]
Distributed by MIT Press. Ten essays trace the history and various uses of pornography in early modern Europe, offering historical perspective that sheds light on current issues of censorship. Among the themes is the linking of pornography as a literary practice with Western modernity and the democratization of culture.

The essays, by historians and literary theorists, examine how pornography emerged between 1500 and 1800 as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. They reveal that the first modern writers and engravers of pornography were part of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers, and libertines who constituted the dark underside of the Renaissance, theScientific Revolution, the Enlightemnent, and the French Revolution. From the beginning, early modern European pornography used the shock of sex to test the boundaries and regulation of decent and obscene behavior and expression in the public and private spheres, criticizing and even subverting religious and political authorities as well social and sexual norms.

Lynn Hunt is the editor of The New Cultural History and the author of The Family Romance of the French Revolution.

Contents: Introduction, Lynn Hunt. Humanism, Politics, and Pornography in Renaissance Italy, Paula Findlen. The Politics of Pornography: L'Ecole des filles, Joan Dejean. Sometimes a Sceptre is only a Sceptre: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England, Rachel Weil. The Materialist World of Pornography, Margaret C. Jacob. Truth and the Obscene Word in Eighteenth-Century French Pornography, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur. The Pornographic Whore: Prostitution in French Pornography from Margot to Juliette, Kathryn Norberg. Erotic Fantasy and the Libertine Dispensation in Eighteenth-Century England, Randolph Trumbach. Politics and Pornography in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic, Wijnand W.Mijnhardt. Pornography and the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt.

Lynn Hunt

Born in Panama and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, she has her B.A. from Carleton College (1967) and her M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1973) from Stanford University. Before coming to UCLA she taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1987-1998) and the University of California, Berkeley (1974-1987).

Prof. Hunt teaches French and European history and the history of history as an academic discipline. Her specialties include the French Revolution, gender history, cultural history and historiography. Her current research projects include an examination of the origins of human rights in the 18th century and a study with Margaret Jacob on British romantics and their links to science and politics.

Prof. Hunt has written extensively on the French Revolution: Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France (1978); Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984); and The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992). She has also written about historical method and epistemology: The New Cultural History (1989); with Joyce Appleby and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (1994); with Jacques Revel, Histories: French Constructions of the Past (1995); and with Victoria Bonnell, Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999). In addition, she has edited collections on the history of eroticism, pornography, and on human rights; published a western civilization textbook, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures (2001) with Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia, and Bonnie G. Smith; and prepared and translated a collection of documents on human rights and the French Revolution. Her books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, Chinese and Polish. --http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/hunt/ [Oct 2005]

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