100% not what I was thinking this book was about. Literally a book about how pornography started. I picked it up because I though it was an erotic Alice in Wonderland retelling. Not what I expected at all. Didn't get more than 3 pages in before I got bored and quit.

It always amazes me at the historical influneces that you don't notice until someone lays them out for you in plain terms. Overall a nice book and I walked away knowing alot more than when I started. I think that's a win.

The premise of the book is great and the author really delivers. Great read. Highly recommended. .

From the description of the book, I was expecting this book to explore pornography from an academic standpoint with parallels being drawn to themes of Victorian Gothic. Unfortunately, I found the actual book to be more of a very surface level collection of arguments, punctuated by the occasional graphic picture. I would have wanted a much more academic approach to the subject matter, with far less opinionated statements and a bit more of academic objectivity.

Interesting discussion fodder. I have friends who have serious opinions about this subject, (I know--weird, but English majors....)

Not at all what I expected. The book sounded like it would be a fun read. Learned very quickly, it wasn't. I'm not into porn, or horror, or a mix of the two, so did not read finish book. First chapter was just too gross out for me.. I really could not get my mind around what I was reading. Sorry. Just not for me....

Before beginning Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic by Laura Helen Marks, the reader should understand that it is an academic text and written for an audience interested in and conversant with porn studies, sociology, anthropology, or a similar field. As such it is well researched and presumably grounded in the current scholarship of that field. Without that background knowledge I found the book dense and difficult to engage with. Marks is clearly passionate about her subject and her argument, however some of her points are delivered in a repetitive manner. Porn is transgressive, we get it.

When I chose to read Alice in Pornoland by Laura Helen Marks I on the understanding it would be a fun book to read. However, I was totally wrong. I found this book Boring, argumentative and just a waste of time.
I would not recommend this book.

Thank you to the publishers for letting me read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book could do with a severe edit (it reads like a PhD thesis) but once you get past the jargon and repetition it starts to get interesting. It's a monumental, academic and detailed account of the way that pornography makes use of what is broadly termed Victorian Gothic. That starts with the concept of the neo-Victorian which is an umbrella term for the way that modern culture reuses or reworks widespread cultural understandings about Victorian life. As an example, anything that works its way round the notion of ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ with pompous aristocrats, poor working domestics and a bit of interplay between the two is a good example.

However, this book is about porn and the way that pornography plays around with some specific cultural understandings of what the Victorians were like. That means a lot of exploitation of prostitutes and maids, wives on pedestals lusting after the gardeners, vampires, innocent and hysterical young girls, spanking, colonial relations with the natives, a furtive secrecy about sex, the sense of a bubbling set of passions underneath a refined surface and quite a lot of ignorance. You can add your own topics but you can see how it is attractive material for pornographers as well as for storytellers.

Pornography works at the boundaries of culture, challenging or transgressing our (normative) understandings of what can be properly be said and, here, transforming the past to produce something arousing for the present. There is an interesting circularity there because the arousal links back to an understanding of Victorian culture which in many ways is not as far distanced from 21st-century life as we sometimes like to pretend. In other words, we like this porn (or upstairs, downstairs type material for that matter) because it connects meaningfully to the present. So, maybe, if you went to a more prestigious school you might be into spanking!

Laura Helen Marks points out how there have been efforts in the past few years  to control pornography and to control the spaces, from the Internet to red light districts, where it flourishes, just as Victorian legislators attempted and for similar prurient reasons. In a sense, there's a constant battle between pornography and censorship but the author also makes the point that the battle ground is also a playground - people enjoy these marginal spaces as porn, mostly on video these days but as prose and graphics in the past.

The focus of the book revolves around some key Victorian starting points including ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’, ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, ‘Dracula’ and ‘Dorian Gray’. There's lots of material there to work with for pornographers! Some of this kicks off in the domain of respectability so there has been academic and literary interest in Lewis Carroll's dodgy enthusiasm for young girls, Dracula's taste for maidens and the question of just how far Dr Jekyll enjoys being Mr Hyde. The trick with neo-Victorian pornography is to take the extra step so that, while providing some arousing titillation in the present, it lifts the lid on an alternative viewing of the past. As just one example, a more feminised reading of ‘Dracula’ makes these extremely voracious fluid extracting women more frightening than the original hero!

The field is slightly complicated by the fact that porn is quite happy to slip over into pastiche so the target of the pornography is something that already represents Victorianism without necessarily providing a 'real' picture of life in those times. As an example, there is a short film pastiche of the serious TV series based on Alex Haley's novel ‘Roots’ called ‘Can't be Roots’ where everyone, except the cuckolded, daft colonial plantation owners, is at it constantly. At one point, you can imagine the scenario, one of the slaves exclaims, 'It ain't so bad being a slave...'. The film, of course, is underlining the opposite point through this pornographic monstrous exaggeration.

Whatever you think about porn and however good you are at concealing and controlling the Mr Hyde which lurks inside you this is a fascinating book. It provides an alternative view of the Victorians as well as of porn, offers an interesting counter to all those genteel accounts of life in those days and provides a gentle warning against well, or unpleasantly, motivated censorship and oppression.

Will you be shocked? Probably not as everyone knows about these sorts of things even if they don't talk about them. If you follow some of the references - and ‘Can't be Roots’ is widely available on the Internet - you might be, but blame it on Mr Hyde!

This was not what I expected (my own fault I didn't realize it was a nonfiction research project) but it was still an interesting read.

A reviewer on here (NetGalley) put it perfectly: Movie reviews and in between opinions from the author. I have to add to this: it felt like a very long essay before the reviews.

It was also NOT what I thought it would be. I think it’s the title that threw a few of us off, expecting “stories” not this.

I received this advance copy for an honest review.

I'm writing this review having not finished the book - because this is an academic text. And I don't know many people that can sit and read an actual academic text in one sitting!

This text requires a chapter by chapter digestion, and explores the themes of pornography viewed and correlated to the Victorian lens. It is sourced and informative, and I shall enjoy very much reading the arguments the author makes.
Pornography is an inherently interesting sociological study, and this book is something I would happily recommend to someone that wants to explore pornography as sociology, though I would perhaps suggest it is not for beginners of academic texts, and some prior knowledge of media studies and sociology and sex and gender studies might be advisable.

This is a positive addition to a feminist school of thought on a heretofore taboo subject and I am happy to have it in my academic library.

While I do find some aspects of an academic examination of pornography interesting, this text felt very repetitive. I did find thought provoking analysis in the examination of the Alice and Dracula themes, and the discussion of the technology of porn was interesting. I also had no idea there was a porn still hidden into Disney's The Rescuers. I just don't feel like I took away any new insight into the subject matter.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This was not what I was expecting.

This scholar of Porn, (his words not mine) wrote a book that was pretty much pages and pages of pornographic movie reviews.
The portions of the book that were not movie reviews were simply his opinions.
I forced myself to finish this book, but did not enjoy it

This is a scholarly monograph rather than a text for the layperson, and I think my average rating is as much a comment on the state of scholarship in media and porn studies as on this particular book: for anyone coming at this from more long-established disciplines (literary criticism, say) it all feels a bit waffly, lacking in in-depth analyses and a theoretical framework.

The book reads like a loosely re-worked doctoral thesis and is quite repetitive, with stock phrases reappearing throughout. That said, Marks asks interesting questions of her material i.e. what does 'Victorianism' do for porn? The term 'Victorianism' is a blurred one as, as the book itself makes clear, some pornographers use it erroneously to mean anything 'old'.

Marks organises her work around pornographic responses to Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dorian Grey, exploring issues of repression and transgression, queerness, femininity, race and generalised 'otherness'. She has certainly done her homework and is refreshingly uncoy when discussing her material. Interesting for anyone working on gender, sexuality, pornography and the erotic.

Thank you to the publishers for letting me read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The description led me to understand that there would be more of a story line followed by evidence suggesting where the author proved why certain topics were the way they were.

This was not the case. The entire book was nothing but arguments and brief interludes of graphic pictures to depict assumptions.

While this book may be good for some, it was not entertaining in the slightest for me.