How did explicit sexual representation become acceptable in the twentieth century as art rather than pornography? Allison Pease answers this question by tracing the relationship between aesthetics and obscenity from the 1700s onward, focusing especially on the way in which early twentieth-century writers incorporated a sexually explicit discourse into their work. The book considers the work of Swinburne, Joyce and Lawrence and artist Aubrey Beardsley within the framework of a wide-ranging account of aesthetic theory beginning with Kant and concluding with F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot.