Erotica and the Enlightenment (review)

REVIEWS 175 Falkland as Christ, Caleb becomes Judas, falling into "an ideology of original sin" (p. 96). "Caleb's closure demonstrates and undermines ideological individualism" (p. 163), the delusion diat masks Godwinian necessity. The battle diat forms die background of this book is diat between the late eighteenthcentury "radicals" and "reactionaries" rather man current literary Üieories or critical debate. Graham draws on some ideas of Genette in his narrative analysis, but his criticism is influenced more by Walter Allen and Marilyn Butler man by current literary radicals. A substantial portion of academic criticism on Caleb Williams is simply ignored, including Mark Philip's study (1986) of the importance of Caleb Williams to the revisions of Political Justice—a subject of some importance to Graham's interests. The bibliography does not contain an up-to-date list of studies of Caleb Williams. But Graham's book nonetheless makes an important contribution to our understanding of the novel's narrative workings, its various successes, its influence, and its tribulations. David McCracken University of Washington Peter Wagner, ed. Erotica and the Enlightenment. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang (Britannia, Vol. II), 1991. 368pp. DM93.00. Among the discursive "histories" spawned since Foucault began constructing discourses of sexuality and others histories of the body, none has fared so poorly as pornography, literally the discourse of or about harlots. It has been the black sheep—die poor child no one will take in, and perhaps because it is such an enfant terrible (the subject is difficult to handle), critical discussion of pornography is still in its infancy. Not only is there no adequate history of pornography—though there are several nonhistorical studies, from Morse Peckham's work in the 1960s dirough to Andrea Dworkin's in our own time—there have not even been any serious attempts. Over a decade ago Angela Carter broached the subject intelligently through a feminist perspective in The Sodeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. A few years later Patrick J. Kearney tried his hand in A History ofErotic Literature (1982), a work that is consistently intelligent and perceptive, but goes out of its way to demarcate die erotic from the pornographic. Walter Kendrick published The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture in 1987, die best general attempt yet, though it has very little to say about matters before 1800. Peter Wagner's Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (1988), a book abounding in historical research, nevertheless remains a narrative without a conceptual framework and incapable of serving as any type of epistemological model to hold this diverse body of literature together. A conference on the history of pornography convened in die autumn of 1991 at the University of Pennsylvania is full of promise, but until its findings appear diere is nothing historical to recommend to students, and certainly no hermeneutic paradigm of die pornographic that takes account of me shifting cultural and discursive settings in which die object—pornography—developed. There is the further glaring gap of pornography's extraordinary connection with die novel. Steven Marcus in 77ie Other Victorians: A Study ofSexuality and Pornography in 176 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:2 Mid-Nineteenth Century England long ago (1966) commented diat "the growtii of pornography is inseparable from and dependent upon the growth of die novel," and despite die vagueness of his assertion the point itself remains unassailably correct. The implication of Marcus's point is diat pornography somehow needed an antecedent novel to latch on to. Marcus never made clear how mis link occurred historically, which discursive practices and genres were involved, or what metaphors were appropriate for its consideration. (In relation to the novel was pornography, for example, parasitic, symbiotic, ecological, derivative, or appropriative?) But ifpornography depends upon the novel in die way Marcus and others have claimed, then it is only natural to surmise diat countries producing novels would also produce quantitites of pornography. We would not expect to find much pornography in countries where few novels were written before 1800: the Netfierlands, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Balkans, Austria, Russia. The rise of the novel is largely an Anglo-French development. Wagner has already made important contributions to die subject in his Eros...