| Sumario: | The book Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, refers constantly to underground literature of all kinds, including ballads, limericks, broadsides, even underground erotic literature. In fact Finnegans Wake even shares some general characteristics with pornography, such as structure, situation, a particular view of language and of life. The epistolary novel Lady Pokingham, by Beatrice Pokingham exhibits some minor idiosyncrasies which are also obsessive themes of the dreamer in Finnegans Wake. Pornography developed as written text beginning in the seventeenth century. Steven Marcus declares pornography to be inseparable from and dependent upon the growth of the novel. Every reader of Finnegans Wake will be reminded of the similarity between the literature of erotic fantasy being described and Joyce's dream novel. Finnegans Wake has neither beginning nor end: the novel beings and ends in midsentence, Joyce himself expected that the ideal reader would simply run the first and last sentences together and keep reading. Generally, anticlericalism is a standard feature of Victorian pornography. The language of Victorian erotic fantasy makes considerable use of epithets, such as sweet girl, mossy recess and silky down, of eighteenth century euphemisms and tautologies, of Homeric exaggerations, like rivulets and showers, and the deliberate ironic use of conventional terms of approbation, including moral, philanthropist and nature.
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