| Summary: | This paper aims at investigating the rhetorical strategies used by some contemporary audiovisual products in order to describe the birth of the pornographic film industry. In particular, through the analysis of three neo-Victorian key texts – Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Ripper Street (episode I Need Light) and Penny Dreadfull (episode Séance) –, the goal is to detect the “conditions of possibility” of pornography, considered as a cultural form, in the context of mass entertaiment related to mainstrem cinema and Anglo-American television series. The notion of fantasy, mainly studied in the field of psychoanalysis, is taken as a theoretical reference point in order to frame audiovisual pornography in terms of ideology (the codification of a cultural phenomenon), dispositif (its perceptual structuring) and narration (the grammar underlying it). The texts analyzed operate according to some historiographical “conceptualizations” extremely significant in terms of both historical and cultural understanding of the phenomenon investigated.
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