The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley

Abstract

Colette Colligan offers an original and compelling examination of obscenity in nineteenth-century British print culture. While carefully following its most significant commercial, legal, and discursive formations in the period, she argues that nineteenth-century obscenity was caught up in the global cultural traffic of print technology, international trade, and exoticism. Her stylish introduction, together with her thoroughly researched four main case studies, offers a unique juxtaposition of nineteenth-century authors, publications, imagery, and events, both well known and underground. Escaping the limitations of dominant histories and theories of nineteenth-century obscenity governed by notions of "The Other Victorians," she reveals that obscenity intersected majority and minority culture, circulated from the farthest reaches of empire back to the metropolis, searched out new print and visual media, and built commercial and fantasmatic global networks for its continuation and survival. This study also foregrounds that the nineteenth-century emergence of obscenity as a transnational trade and concept dispersed across media, markets, and borders has lasting implications on present-day fears and fantasies of its relentless circulation in diverse media environments. The Traffic in Obscenity From Byron to Beardsley is a major contribution to the fields of nineteenth-century literature and culture as well as interdisciplinary obscenity studies.