The unquenchable thirst of Dracula. The animal lust of Mr. Hyde. The acquiescence of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Victorian literature—with its overtones of prudishness, respectability, and Old World hypocrisy—belies a subverted eroticism. The Victorian Gothic is monstrous but restrained, repressed but perverse, static but transformative, and preoccupied by gender and sexuality in both regressive and progressive ways.

Laura Helen Marks investigates the contradictions and seesawing gender dynamics in Victorian-inspired adult films and looks at why pornographers persist in drawing substance and meaning from the era's Gothic tales. She focuses on the particular Victorianness that pornography prefers, and the mythologies of the Victorian era that fuel today's pornographic fantasies. In turn, she exposes what porning the Victorians shows us about pornography as a genre.

A bold foray into theory and other forbidden places, Alice in Pornoland reveals how modern-day Victorian Gothic pornography constantly emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates issues of gender, sexuality, and race.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Skin Flicks Chapter One Behind Closed Doors: Neo-Victorian Pornographies Chapter Two I Want to Suck Your . . . : Fluids and Fluidity in Dracula Porn Chapter Three I'm Grown Up Now: Female Sexual Authorship and Coming of Age in Pornographic Adaptati Chapter Four Radically Both: Transformation and Crisis in Jekyll and Hyde Porn Chapter Five Strange Legacies of Thought and Passion: Technologies of the Flesh and the Queering E Conclusion: Fueling the Lamps of Sexual Imagination Notes Bibliography Index |"[Marks's] book will certainly be of interest to porn studies scholars. It also provides solid accounts of the ways that pornographers generate new erotic energies from classic texts. " —Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
"Through its in-depth investigation of the dialogue between the porn industry and the world of our supposedly 'prudish' forefathers, Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic represents an important contribution to the analysis of a cinematic genre (neo-Victorian porn) that has been partially neglected in scholarly works." —Neo-Victorian Studies
"A giddy pleasure to read the future of porn studies unfolding in these pages."—Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
|Laura Helen Marks is a professor of practice in the Department of English at Tulane University.