Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View

Description

Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive. On the one hand, literary censorship has been posited as not only inescapable but definitive, even foundational to speech itself. One the other, especially after the opening of the USSR’s spekstrahn, those enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, the push to redefine censorship expansively has encountered cogent criticism. Scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and book banning in colonial countries also demonstrates censorship’s formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines these and other developments across twelve countries, from the Enlightenment to the present day, offering case studies from the French revolution to Internet China. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final, failed version of national control? Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Introduction Part I 1. French Censorship on the Eve of the Revolution 2. Not Guilty: Negative Capability and the Trials of William Hone 3. The Gender of Censorship: John Wilson Croker, Mary Hays and the Aftermath of the Queen Caroline Affair 4. ‘The Chastity of our Records’: Reading and Judging Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Courts Part II 5. Controlling Ideas and Controlling People: Libel, Surveillance, Banishment and Indigenous Literary Expression in the Dutch East Indies 6. Teaching Librarians to be Censors: Library Education for Francophones in Quebec, 1937–61 7. Surrealism to Pulp: The Limits of the Literary and Australian Customs 8. ‘That Monstrous Thing’: The Critic as Censor in Apartheid South Africa Part III 9. Diabolical Evasion of the Censor in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita 10. Reading the Enemy: East German Censorship across the Wall 11. Wild Spiders Crying Together: Confessional Poetry, Censorship and the Cold War 12. Freedom to Read: Barney Rosset, Henry Miller and the End of Obscenity Part IV 13. Out of the Shadows: The Emergence of Overt Gay Narratives in Australia 14. Silenced Lives: Censorship and the Rise of Diasporic Iranian Women’s Memoirs in English 15. Egypt’s Facebook Revolution: Arab Diaspora Literature and Censorship in the Homeland 16. China’s Elusive Truths: Censorship, Value and Literature in the Internet Age Contributors Index