Pornography and the battles over it can provide insight into the sexual tensions in society, the relation between the citizen and the state, the nature of consumerism, relative levels of power between different groups, and many other issues. In this collection dedicated to the study of European pornography, Sigel (history, DePaul U.) presents 10 studies that examine some of these topics, including German obscenity as a politically corrupting force in the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the formation of the German Empire, the shifting political allegiances of French pornography in the 19th century, the origins of English flagellation literature as a racist inversion of the abolitionist slave narrative, the erotic postcard as a concrete image of imperialism and European dominion, the impact of American cultural hegemony on European pornography, the economics of Hungarian video pornography in the 1990s, and the explosion of Russian pornography as a reaction to the authoritarianism of Soviet society. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)