The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 by Bradford K. Mudge (review)

95 extensive than anything done by lesser encyclopedists intimidated by the complexity of Restoration theater culture. He is willing to count Locke as a humorist insofar as he contributed to the psychological analysis of wit. He even finds humor in sallow Milton and in ideological Behn. FamiliarpoemssuchasMacFlecknoe take on a new life when set out as benchmarks in the history of modern hilarity . Likewise, undervalued jottings such as Waller’s Instructions to a Painter take on a previously unnoticed importance as triggers for parody, travesty, burlesque , and thence laughter. The gems must be mined out of a deep but choked vein of older, sometimes superannuated scholarship. Mr. Nilsenlikes to give plenty of play to big-nameauthors and genre critics, not many of whom are early-modern specialists and most of whom were flourishing back in the 1970s and 1980s. His bibliographies on writers like Rochester, for example, include digest-sources by Donald Bruce and Hugh Walker but nothing from the likes of Dustin Griffin, David Vieth, or David Farley-Hills. Humor in British Literature is useful as a starter point in humor studies. It brings together otherwise scattered resources on a somewhat underappreciated field of study, but it must be used with caution, especially in the classroom, where naive students are likely to mistake it for a complete, not a suggestive, guide to Restoration jocularity. Kevin L. Cope Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge BRADFORD K. MUDGE. The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830. Oxford: Oxford , 2000. Pp. xiv ⫹276. $35. Although Mr. Mudge attempts halfheartedly to sympathize with recent antipornography zealots like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, his study of pornography and the novel comes down firmly on the side of the purveyors of smut, including Curll, who emerges in The Whore’s Story as a hero of the eighteenth-century literary marketplace . Mr. Mudge’s engaging and provocative study of the interrelated ‘‘rises’’ of pornography and literature in eighteenth -century Britain argues that the separation between the categories, which many modern readers and some modern lawyers take for granted, is the product of turbulence in an undifferentiated marketplace of print. The literary novel— exemplified by Richardson’s work—is indebted to a tradition of (mostly women ’s) salacious fictions, even while it explicitly repudiates the frankly arousing aims of the earlier work. Mr. Mudge’s book complements the scholarship of other genealogists of the eighteenthcentury novel; readers will recognize William Warner’s Licensing Entertainment as a particularly sympathetic confrere . The Whore’s Story promotes the writing of Behn, Manley, and Haywood as interesting in its own right and as central to literary history. After its perhaps overdrawn Introduction , which uses Anaı̈s Nin and Lydia Lunch to counter the MacDworkinites, the book offers achapteronmasquerades. Mr. Mudge acknowledges his debt to Terry Castle’s interpretation in Masquerade and Civilization, but he emphasizes a literal connection between prostitution and literature. Mr. Mudge points out that the word ‘‘pornography’’ is a relative neologism , having been coined, according to the OED, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Literally ‘‘writing about prostitutes ,’’ ‘‘pornography’’ turns out to be an accurate term for much of the nonliterary (and nonfictional) writing he addresses. 96 Books on prostitution, he pointsout,walk a fine line between moral condemnation and provocative celebration. Furthermore , in the undifferentiatedliterarymarketplace of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, books like Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and hisSisterandManley’sNewAtalantiscan stand next to Curll publications—not only Venus in the Cloister but alsoATreatise on the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs and Onanism Displayd. The cultural background and detailed analysis of the literary marketplace serve to create a context for Mr. Mudge’s fine criticism on the fiction. His readings of Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Shamela are as perceptive as his appreciations of Love in Excess, Fanny Hill, and The Monk. Indeed , applying the same techniques of close reading to the ‘‘literary’’ and the ‘‘pornographic’’ does a better job of supporting the thesis than do his broad accountsof culturalandliteraryhistory.The individual readings are extremely persuasive ; I came away almost convinced that ‘‘Monk’’ Lewis was a writer of genius . The Whore’s Story does an admirable job of prodding...