Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download A Matter of Obscenity PDF full book. Access full book title A Matter of Obscenity by Christopher Hilliard. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Christopher Hilliard Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691226105 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
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: Christopher Hilliard Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691226105 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
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: Amy Werbel Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 023154703X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 589
Book Description
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: Richard F. Hixson Publisher: SIU Press ISBN: 9780809320578 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
Examines the ways in which the Supreme Court has dealt with obscenity. Chronological chapters featuring a specific aspect of the constitutional problem and the solutions espoused by a particular justice relate each decision to the temper of the times and the guarantees of the First and Fourth Amendments. Concludes that private collection of pornographic material should be restricted only by time and place. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Erica Weitzman Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 0810143186 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 447
Book Description
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: Whitney Strub Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700619372 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
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: Charles Rembar Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1504015673 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 512
Book Description
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: Stephen Tropiano Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0879104546 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 393
Book Description
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: Christopher Hilliard
Author: Christopher Hilliard
Author: Amy Werbel
Author: Richard F. Hixson
Author: Erica Weitzman
Author: Rokudenashiko
Author: Whitney Strub
Author: Charles Rembar
Author: Stephen Tropiano
Author: Alec Craig
Author: John Chandos