The Whore's Story Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830 [Hardcover]

This fresh and persuasively argued book examines the origins of pornography in Britain and presents a comprehensive overview of women's role in the evolution of obscene fiction. Carefully monitoring the complex interconnections between three related debates--that over the masquerade, that over the novel, and that over prostitution--Mudge contextualizes the growing literary need to separate good fiction from bad and argues that that process was of crucial importance to the emergence of a new, middle-class state. Looking closely at sermons, medical manuals, periodical essays, and political tracts as well as poetry, novels, and literary criticism,The Whore's Storytracks the shifting politics of pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain and charts the rise of modern, pornographic sensibilities.

Bradford K Mudge'sThe Whore's Storyis an important contribution to this project...a welcome addition to the literature on gender and sexuality in the period...with its thorough discussion of both familiar and obscure primary texts and its engaging readable style... --ECCB

The Whore's Storythus offers a new answer to the question of how writing that today is called the novel, and it sexuality as active agents-they became its subject....In spite of the large amount of literature already existing on the subject, Mudge finds new and striking examples. --Eighteenth-Century Studies

The Whore's Story's most valuable contribution is in widening our understanding of eighteenth-century literary are diminished from view when we privilege one set of authors, or literary techniques, over another....In the early twenty-first century we have accepted the separation of literature from pornography as 'natural.'The Whore's Storyasks us to rethink this assumption and provides a provocative literary history in which to understand pornography and literature as mutually dependent, mutually generative. --The WlÃØ