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Genres for the Prosecution: Pornography and the Gothic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael Gamer
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Abstract

Recent accounts of genre have asserted that all texts participate in multiple genres and that genre works as a kind of contract between writers and readers. In the legal history of eighteenth-century British prosecutions for obscene libel and the reception history of gothic fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the model of genre as contract breaks down. At the end of the eighteenth century, several texts we now call gothic faced threatened prosecution under existing obscene libel laws. The reception histories of the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and Charles Robert Maturin demonstrate that public denouncements and threatened prosecution forced gothic texts, even as they theoretically participated in at least one genre, to belong to a legal category (obscenity) for which their writers never intended them.

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Type
Research Article
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PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 5 , October 1999, pp. 1043 - 1054
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Modem Language Association of America

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