Steven Marcus is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 academic and literary critic. He is George Delacorte Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

.

One of the founders of the National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center

The National Humanities Center is an independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. It is the only major independent institute for advanced study in all fields of the humanities in the United States. The NHC operates as a privately incorporated nonprofit and is not part of any...

, he is a former Fellow (1980-2) and a current Trustee.

Works

Marcus is notable for his book The Other Victorians: a Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1966). Key works studied are The Romance of Lust (1873-6), My Secret Life

My Secret Life (erotica)

My Secret Life, by "Walter", is the memoir of a Victorian gentleman's sexual development and experiences. It was first published in a private edition of eleven volumes, which appeared over seven years beginning around 1888....

, The Indices of Henry Spencer Ashbee

Henry Spencer Ashbee

Henry Spencer Ashbee was a book collector, writer, and bibliographer, notorious for his massive, clandestine three volume bibliography of erotic literature written under the pseudonym of Pisanus Fraxi.-Life:...

, and William Acton

William Acton

William Acton was a British medical doctor and book writer. He was known for his books on masturbation.-Biography:Acton was a native of Shillingstone and he enrolled as a resident apprentice at St Bartholomew's Hospital....

's work. The study is psychological in nature — relying much on the work of Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

, and Marcus invents a word to describe the sexual activities in pornographic literature, “pornotopia”. Marcus describes “pornotopia” as being like a place where “all men … are always and infinitely potent

Potent

Potent may refer to:*Vair#Potent for the heraldic fur*Warren Potent for the Australian Olympic medalist in shootingSee also:*Potency...

; all women fecundate

Fecundity

Fecundity, derived from the word fecund, generally refers to the ability to reproduce. In demography, fecundity is the potential reproductive capacity of an individual or population. In biology, the definition is more equivalent to fertility, or the actual reproductive rate of an organism or...

 with lust

Lust

Lust is an emotional force that is directly associated with the thinking or fantasizing about one's desire, usually in a sexual way.-Etymology:The word lust is phonetically similar to the ancient Roman lustrum, which literally meant "purification"...

 and flow inexhaustibly with sap

Sap

Sap may refer to:* Plant sap, the fluid transported in xylem cells or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant* Sap , a village in the Dunajská Streda District of Slovakia...

 or juice

Juice

Juice is the liquid that is naturally contained in fruit or vegetable tissue.Juice is prepared by mechanically squeezing or macerating fruit or vegetable flesh without the application of heat or solvents. For example, orange juice is the liquid extract of the fruit of the orange tree...

 or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (p. 276). Given the libido

Libido

Libido refers to a person's sex drive or desire for sexual activity. The desire for sex is an aspect of a person's sexuality, but varies enormously from one person to another, and it also varies depending on circumstances at a particular time. A person who has extremely frequent or a suddenly...

s of the characters

Fictional character

A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...

, the comment is apt. Because of the often unrealistic description of sexual activities and positions in The Romance of Lust, Marcus uses the word vector to describe the mechanical sex acts. He also speaks of emotional deprivation in conjunction with the work, because the characters do not interact with one another as real, thinking, and feeling persons would do.

Criticism of The Other Victorians as voiced by historian Brian Harrison includes the argument that Marcus aims with pornotopia to seek out "the common characteristics of pornography at all times" (p. 248), but draws only from samples ranging from 1828 to 1884, disregarding the pornography of the 20th century completely. Harrison also challenges Marcus' viewpoint, which is at times permissive, and at times moralising and pitying (p. 249), but never objective.