Reading, Writing, and Publishing an Obscene Canon: The Archival Logic of the Secret Museum, c. 1860-c. 1900.

Abstract

This article investigates how a loose network of Victorian book collectors, bibliographers, self-styled sexual scientists, and pornographers represented the obscene as a multifarious category of print, encompassing a generically, historically, and linguistically varied range of works about (or associated in the public imagination with) sex. By examining this elite network's reading, writing, collection, publishing, and advertising practices, this article demonstrates how diversely arrayed publications can, as a result of interacting historical, ideological, and commercial factors, become imaginatively linked, structuring the ways in which they are published, disseminated, and interpreted by their readers.