Dirt for Art's Sake
Subtitle: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: November 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780801441684
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers: 19th century; Novels, other prose & writers: from c 1900 -; Pornography & obscenity; History: World; French literature; Censorship; Literary Criticism; History - General History; Literature - Classics / Criticism; French; History; Gender Studies; Books & Reading; European - French; General; American fiction; 19th century; 20th century; English fiction
Description: "In [this book], 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. 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."--Jacket.