Through most of its history, pornographic literature has been limited and censored. Despite losing some of its transgressiveness and extremeness due to the emergence of pornographic films and social media, many authors still search for ways to avoid censorship, and its morality remains up for debate. Thus, pornographic literature and our attitudes towards it reflect general views and beliefs in an important way. This thesis explores whether pornographic literature can, despite its formulaic nature and genre limitations, still be subversive and disrupt the status quo. The thesis attempts to answer this question through the analysis of Henry Miller’s Opus Pistorum and Anaïs Nin's Little Birds and The Delta of Venus. The role of the author's gender in the construction of the pornographic in these works are also briefly touched upon. The works are analysed from the viewpoint of all three major methodological paradigms. Firstly, it is analysed how they were created and their extratextual reality (the authors and their views), the largest part is dedicated to the actual analysis of the text, and the last part analyses the reader reception. The analysis shows that pornographic literature, already from what makes it pornographic (sexual content), does contain the possibility for subversives, which is also fulfilled in the analysed works. In them, we find subversiveness, but it also turns out that they confirm and uphold the status quo in some respects. The treatment of sexual content itself enables pornographic literature to examine more difficult themes, which would have been much more tricky in a different context, but it at the same time allows for an un-reflected validation of harmful stereotypes.
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