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Pornography and the Novel

This chapter explains how the emerging novel has not only the problem of how to fend off the widespread accusation of lubricity, but also the corresponding problem of what to do with sex when desire drives the plot. There was no clear category of ‘pornographic’ writing during this period. Modern collections of early sex-writing contain medical treatises, smutty poems, law cases, and translations from Continental sex manuals. These clandestine classics overlap with some early types of novel, in period and often setting, in their anti-authoritarian slant, and their scepticism towards everything except the power of bodily desires. The corpus of proto-pornography, inchoate as it was, was not a sufficient matrix for the novel, still less a discursive origin for it, so much as an oblique presence at the margins of vision.