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Allison Pease. Modernism, Mass Culiure, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Pp. xvi + 244.
What literary forces allowed serious 20th-century writers to employ sexual tropes previously limited to works like Lady Bumtickler's Revels (c.1890) and Lady Gay Spanker's Tales of Fun and Flagellation (c. 1896)? And why did critics defend works like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover that contained explicit sexual scenes? Pease seeks to answer these questions by surveying some two centuries of aesthetic theory, from the early 18th to the 20th century.
In his Spectator essays on the pleasures of the imagination (1712), Joseph Addison, in a tradition going back to Plato, distinguished between "our more sensual delights" and higher, intellectual enjoyment. Shaftesbury and Kant similarly excluded sensation from the aesthetic realm. Kant's Critique of Judgement distinguished between "agreeable" art, which elicits sensual response, and the "beautiful," which gives pleasure through reflection. Hegel's The Philosophy of Fine Art concurred: "Mind, and mind alone, is pervious to truth, comprehending all in itself, so that all which is beautiful can only be veritably beautiful as partaking in this higher sphere and begotten of the same." The function of true art, Hegel wrote, "is exclusively to satisfy spiritual interests, and to shut the door on all approach to mere desire." Although Marx rejected Hegel's idealism, he agreed that art should objectify the senses.
For Pease, Swinburne "ushered in a new era of sexual representation...