Literary Obscenities
Literary Obscenities

Author: Erik M. Bachman

Publisher: Refiguring Modernism

Published: 2019-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780271080062

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines U.S. obscenity trials in the early twentieth century and how they framed a wide-ranging debate about the printed word's power to deprave, offend, and shape behavior.

Girls Lean Back Everywhere
Girls Lean Back Everywhere

Author: Edward De Grazia

Publisher: New York : Random House

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 832

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Chronicles the battles fought and won during the twentieth century in behalf of free expression.

Reading the Obscene
Reading the Obscene

Author: Jordan Carroll

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2021-11-23

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 150362949X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With Reading the Obscene, Jordan Carroll reveals new insights about the editors who fought the most famous anti-censorship battles of the twentieth century. While many critics have interpreted obscenity as a form of populist protest, Reading the Obscene shows that the editors who worked to dismantle censorship often catered to elite audiences composed primarily of white men in the professional-managerial class. As Carroll argues, transgressive editors, such as H. L. Mencken at the Smart Set and the American Mercury, William Gaines and Al Feldstein at EC Comics, Hugh Hefner at Playboy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, and Barney Rosset at Grove Press, taught their readers to approach even the most scandalizing texts with the same cold calculation and professional reserve they employed in their occupations. Along the way, these editors kicked off a middle-class sexual revolution in which white-collar professionals imagined they could control sexuality through management science. Obscenity is often presented as self-shattering and subversive, but with this provocative work Carroll calls into question some of the most sensational claims about obscenity, suggesting that when transgression becomes a sign of class distinction, we must abandon the idea that obscenity always overturns hierarchies and disrupts social order. Winner of the 2022 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, sponsored by the Modern Language Association

Obscene Literature and Constitutional Law; a Forensic Defense of Freedom of the Press
Obscene Literature and Constitutional Law; a Forensic Defense of Freedom of the Press

Author: Theodore Schroeder

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 9781230220727

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XV. UNCERTAINTY OF THE "MORAL" TEST OF OBSCENITY.* Our Courts, in their blind non-logical gropings for some practical criteria of guilt under these vague statutes against "obscenity," have often amended the statutes so as to make the criminality of admitted facts depend, not upon the literal application of the letter of the statute, but upon the jury's opinion, according to its personal standards, as to whether or not the matter is such as might tend to deprave the morals of some hypothetical person who might be open to such immoral influences. Assuming now for the sake of argument that this judicial legislation is entirely proper as a matter of legitimate statutory construction, then the question arises whether this makes the statutory criteria of guilt so certain in meaning as is necessary to constitute this statute "due process of law." If courts can be said to have answered a question which they have not even considered, because the answer is a necessary inference from their acts, then the courts have answered this question in the affirmative. Is this answer by implication correct? The inquiry now to be pursued is as to whether or not there exists an agreement as to the criteria of the ethical right in general, and of sex ethics in particular, such as enables the "moral" test of obscenity to satisfy the constitutional requirement as to the necessary certainty of the criteria of guilt in a penal statute. The method will be to study the various schools of ethics, and to exhibit what the various leaders of thought have to say upon the subject. RELIGION AND SCIENCE DISTINGUISHED. The most conspicuous line of cleavage between differing schools of morals, is that which separates religious morality from ethical science. The matter...

Literary Obscenities
Literary Obscenities

Author: Erik M. Bachman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2018-03-14

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0271081678

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This comparative historical study explores the broad sociocultural factors at play in the relationships among U.S. obscenity laws and literary modernism and naturalism in the early twentieth century. Putting obscenity case law’s crisis of legitimation and modernism’s crisis of representation into dialogue, Erik Bachman shows how obscenity trials and other attempts to suppress allegedly vulgar writing in the United States affected a wide-ranging debate about the power of the printed word to incite emotion and shape behavior. Far from seeking simply to transgress cultural norms or sexual boundaries, Bachman argues, proscribed authors such as Wyndham Lewis, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, and James T. Farrell refigured the capacity of writing to evoke the obscene so that readers might become aware of the social processes by which they were being turned into mass consumers, voyeurs, and racialized subjects. Through such efforts, these writers participated in debates about the libidinal efficacy of language with a range of contemporaries, from behavioral psychologists and advertising executives to book cover illustrators, magazine publishers, civil rights activists, and judges. Focusing on case law and the social circumstances informing it, Literary Obscenities provides an alternative conceptual framework for understanding obscenity’s subjugation of human bodies, desires, and identities to abstract social forces. It will appeal especially to scholars of American literature, American studies, and U.S. legal history.

The Novel and the Obscene
The Novel and the Obscene

Author: Florence Dore

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9780804751872

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Novel and the Obscene challenges our vision of early twentieth-century America as sexually progressive by identifying a resonant silence at the heart of the modernist American novel—a narrative mode that renders censorship symbolic at the very moment of its legal demise.

Imperiled Innocents
Imperiled Innocents

Author: Nicola Kay Beisel

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1998-07-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1400822084

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Moral reform movements claiming to protect children began to emerge in the United States over a century ago, most notably when Anthony Comstock and his supporters crusaded to restrict the circulation of contraception, information on the sexual rights of women, and "obscene" art and literature. Much of their rhetoric influences debates on issues surrounding children and sexuality today. Drawing on Victorian accounts of pregnant girls, prostitutes, Free Lovers, and others deemed "immoral," Nicola Beisel argues that rhetoric about the moral corruption of children speaks to an ongoing parental concern: that children will fail to replicate or exceed their parents' social position. The rhetoric of morality, she maintains, is more than symbolic and goes beyond efforts to control mass behavior. For the Victorians, it tapped into the fear that their own children could fall prey to vice and ultimately live in disgrace. In a rare analysis of Anthony Comstock's crusade with the New York and New England Societies for the Suppression of Vice, Beisel examines how the reformer worked on the anxieties of the upper classes. One tactic was to link moral corruption with the flood of immigrants, which succeeded in New York and Boston, where minorities posed a political threat to the upper classes. Showing how a moral crusade can bring a society's diffuse anxieties to focus on specific sources, Beisel offers a fresh theoretical approach to moral reform movements.