Description
Book SynopsisExamines 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.
Trade Review“A profound reassessment not only of American censorship issues, Literary Obscenities joins the current rethinking of modernist studies, particularly in terms of the paperback revolution and its long-term cultural impact. This welcome addition to the ongoing discourse in legal studies, book history, cultural studies, and the philosophy of modernism is cause for celebration. Bachman’s well-researched, acutely insightful, accessibly written study will take its place alongside Marjorie Heins’s Not in Front of the Children as a staple in university courses.”
—S. E. Gontarski,author of Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze
“Provides a historical framework and literary context for perhaps better understanding modern, printed-words-only obscenity prosecutions and why they are now so rare.”
—Clay Calvert Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
“[Bachman] offers a historical perspective on modernism and literary naturalism and shrewdly covers the relationship between what is on the page and how readers respond to it.”
—D. C. Greenwood Choice
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Getting Off the Page
2. How to Misbehave as aBehaviorist (if You’re Wyndham Lewis)
3. Erskine Caldwell, Smut, and the Paperbacking of Obscenity
4. Sin, Sex, and Segregation in Lillian Smith’s Silent South
Conclusion: Off the Page
Notes
Bibliography
Index
