Making Pornography, 1749–1968: The History of The History of the Human Heart

This essay argues for a historicized approach to defining the genre of pornography. Providing a detailed textual history of one little-known novel from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, I show that narrative descriptions of sex acts become streamlined and condensed over time, a result of editing practices that suppress elements of the text deemed non-erotic. The original shows us that prior to the establishment of a market for pornography, narrative descriptions of sex acts were considered gateways to other kinds of reading and thinking—about religion, science, philosophy, gender. Obscured by the practices of bibliography and cataloguing, eighteenth-century pornography fuses sexual narrative with other kinds of content and discourse, standing as a hybrid, critical, and comic point of origin for the genre.