Modernism and the Theater of Censorship

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Oxford University Press, Feb 22, 1996 - Literary Criticism - 256 pages
Adam Parkes investigates the literary and cultural implications of the censorship encountered by several modern novelists in the early twentieth century. He situates modernism in the context of this censorship, examining the relations between such authors as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf and the public controversies generated by their fictional explorations of modern sexual themes. These authors located "obscenity" at the level of stylistic and formal experiment. The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, and Orlando dramatized problems of sexuality and expression in ways that subverted the moral, political, and aesthetic premises on which their censors operated. In showing how modernism evolved within a culture of censorship, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship suggests that modern novelists, while shaped by their culture, attempted to reshape it.
 

Contents

The Trials of Modernism
3
The Rainbow and Wartime Censorship
21
Ulysses and the Little Review Trial
65
The Case of Lady Chatterleys Lover
107
Orlando and The Well of Loneliness
144
Notes
181
Bibliography
215
Index
229
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