A Matter Of Obscenity

Author : Christopher Hilliard
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691226105
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Matter of Obscenity written by Christopher Hilliard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of censorship in modern Britain For Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by which they meant the increasingly literate and enfranchised working classes. The law stayed this way even as society evolved. In 1960, in the obscenity trial over D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the prosecutor asked the jury, "Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" Christopher Hilliard traces the history of British censorship from the Victorians to Margaret Thatcher, exposing the tensions between obscenity law and a changing British society. Hilliard goes behind the scenes of major obscenity trials and uncovers the routines of everyday censorship, shedding new light on the British reception of literary modernism and popular entertainments such as the cinema and American-style pulp fiction and comic books. He reveals the thinking of lawyers and the police, authors and publishers, and politicians and ordinary citizens as they wrestled with questions of freedom and morality. He describes how supporters and opponents of censorship alike tried to remake the law as they reckoned with changes in sexuality and culture that began in the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research, this incisive and multifaceted book reveals how the issue of censorship challenged British society to confront issues ranging from mass literacy and democratization to feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism.

Author : Whitney Strub
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700619372
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Obscenity Rules written by Whitney Strub and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some, he was “America’s leading smut king,” hauled into court repeatedly over thirty years for peddling obscene publications through the mail. But when Samuel Roth appealed a 1956 conviction, he forced the Supreme Court to finally come to grips with a problem that had plagued both American society and constitutional law for longer than he had been in business. For while the facts of Roth v. United States were unexceptional, its constitutional issues would define the relationship of obscenity to the First Amendment. The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in Roth for the first time tried to definitively rule on the issue of obscenity in American life and law—and failed. In this first book-length examination of the case, Whitney Strub lays out the history of obscenity’s meaning as a legal concept, highlights the influence of antivice crusaders like Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, and chronicles the shadowy career that led Roth to spend nearly a decade of his life imprisoned for the allegedly obscene materials that he sent through the mails. Strub then unwraps the events that produced Roth v. United States, placing the trial in the context of its times—the Kinsey Reports, the Kefauver hearings, free speech debates—by using Roth’s own private papers along with the records of the various prosecutions and the memos of the justices. The significance of Roth, as Strub reveals, lay in the two faces of Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion—which on the one hand reflected the liberalizing attitude toward sexual matters in mid-century America, but on the other kept “obscene” expressions beyond First Amendment protection. Because that ruling points up the contradictions of a society where the prurient and repressive commingle uncomfortably, Strub shows how Roth says much more about American sexual values than Brennan’s written words necessarily acknowledged. In our era of internet pornography and Fifty Shades of Grey, it may be difficult to imagine a time when obscenity was a matter for the courts. As Strub tracks the legacy of Roth and obscenity law through the ongoing policing of acceptable sexuality into the twenty-first century, his riveting narrative brings those times to life and helps readers navigate the fine line between what is socially acceptable and what is criminally obscene.

Author : Amy Werbel
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 023154703X
Total Pages : 589 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Lust on Trial written by Amy Werbel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship. In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.

Author : Erica Weitzman
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810143186
Total Pages : 447 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book At the Limit of the Obscene written by Erica Weitzman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-15 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.

Author : Rokudenashiko
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781927668313
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.1X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What is Obscenity? written by Rokudenashiko and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rokudenashiko's mission is to demystify female genitalia, a mission that has led to a vulva-shaped kayak and her arrest.

Author : Charles Rembar
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1504015673
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The End of Obscenity written by Charles Rembar and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Polk Award Winner: This account of American book banning and the battles against it is "a tour de force to fascinate lawyers and laymen alike” (The New York Times Book Review). Up until the 1960s, depending on your state of residence, your copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer might be seized by the US Postal Service before reaching your mailbox. Selling copies of Cleland’s Fanny Hill in your bookstore was considered illegal. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence was, according to the American legal system, pornography with no redeeming social value. Today, these novels are celebrated for their literary and historic worth. The End of Obscenity is Charles Rembar’s account of successfully arguing the merits of such great works of literature in front of the Supreme Court. As the lead attorney on the case, he—with the support of a few brave publishers—changed the way Americans read and honor books, especially the controversial ones. Filled with insight from lawyers, justices, and the authors themselves, The End of Obscenity is a lively tour de force. Racy testimony and hilarious asides make Rembar’s memoir not only a page-turner but also an enlightening look at the American legal system. “[Rembar’s] book deals not with the why of obscenity laws but with the how . . . many of his anecdotal digressions into history and law are sharp and amusing.” —The New Republic

Author : Elisabeth Ladenson
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801460379
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dirt for Art's Sake written by Elisabeth Ladenson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and their authors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories have to tell us about the works themselves and about a changing cultural climate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them as masterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966); she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Over the course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that had been circulating in the form of avant-garde heresy gradually became accepted as truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense. The first is captured in the formula "art for art's sake"-the notion that a work of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. The second is realism, vilified by its critics as "dirt for dirt's sake." In Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is closer to -dirt for art's sake-"the idea that the work of art may legitimately include the representation of all aspects of life, including the unpleasant and the sordid. Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these novels, among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and the 1997 remake directed by Adrian Lyne, and various attempts to translate de Sade's works and life into film, which faced similar censorship travails. Written with a keen awareness of ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical acumen and delightful wit.

Author : Stephen Tropiano
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 0879104546
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Obscene, Indecent, Immoral & Offensive written by Stephen Tropiano and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This entertaining and insightful book is the first devoted exclusively to the films that have earned a special place in motion picture history by pushing the “cinematic envelope” with their treatment of provocative subjects and themes. Obscene, Indecent, Immoral & Offensive: 100+ Years of Controversial Cinema chronicles the history of Hollywood censorship and the films that were banned, censored, and condemned by the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency. Stephen Tropiano offers readers insightful and accessible analysis of films that were branded “controversial” at the time of their release due to explicit language, nudity, graphic sex, violence, and their treatment of “adult” subject matter and themes. The films profiled include The Birth of a Nation, Anatomy of a Murder, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Baby Doll, Blackboard Jungle, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange, Natural Born Killers, Caligula, Rosemary's Baby, Life of Brian, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Passion of the Christ.

Author : Carissa M. Harris
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501730428
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Obscene Pedagogies written by Carissa M. Harris and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman's songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. Harris's own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.

Author : Alec Craig
Publisher : Cleveland, World Publishing Company
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suppressed Books written by Alec Craig and published by Cleveland, World Publishing Company. This book was released on 1963 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: