James Joyce And Censorship

James Joyce and Censorship is the first book to tell the fascinating story of the trials of Ulysses. Based on extensive archival research, it is also the first study of the trials to analyze their influence on the reception and composition of Ulysses in the context of Joyce's lifelong struggle with the censors, to evaluate their significance as an important turning point in the history of censorship, and to emphasize their relevance to contemporary debates regarding freedom of literary expression.

James Joyce and Censorship is the first book to tell the fascinating story of the trials of Ulysses. Based on extensive archival research, it is also the first study of the trials to analyze their influence on the reception and composition of Ulysses in the context of Joyce's lifelong struggle with the censors, to evaluate their significance as an important turning point in the history of censorship, and to emphasize their relevance to contemporary debates regarding freedom of literary expression.

Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.

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

Through the twentieth century, from colonial Ireland to the United States, and from Franco's Spain to late Soviet Russia, to include sexuality in a novel signaled social progressiveness and artistic innovation, but also transgression. Certain novelists--such as James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Luis Martín-Santos, and Viktor Erofeev--radicalized the content of the novel by incorporating sexual thoughts, situations, and fantasies and thus portraying repressed areas of social, cultural, political, and mental life. In The Artistic Censoring of Sexuality: Fantasy and Judgment in the Twentieth-Century Novel, Susan Mooney extensively examines four modernist and postmodernist novels that prompted in their day harsh external censorship because of their sexual content--Ulysses, Lolita, Time of Silence, and Russian Beauty. She shows how motifs of censorship, with all its restrictions, pressures, rules, judgments, and forms of negation, became artistically embedded in the novels' plots, characters, settings, tropes, and themes. These novels contest censorship's status quo and critically explore its processes and power. This study reveals the impact of censorship on literary creation, particularly in relation to the twentieth century's growing interest in sexuality and its discourses.

In James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity, Katherine Mullin offers a richly detailed account of Joyce's lifelong battle against censorship. Through prodigious archival research, Mullin shows Joyce responding to Edwardian ideologies of social purity by accentuating the 'contentious' or 'offensive' elements in his work. Ulysses, A Portrait and Dubliners each meticulously subvert purity discourse. This important and highly original book will change the way Joyce is read and offers crucial insights into the sexual politics of Modernism.

Government censorship had a profound impact on the development of canonical modernism and on the public images of modernist writers. Celia Marshik argues that censorship can benefit as well as harm writers and the works they create in response to it. She weaves together histories of official and unofficial censorship, of individual writers and their relationships to such censorship and of British modernism. Throughout, Marshik draws on an extraordinary range of evidence, including the files of government agencies and social purity organisations. She analyses how works were written, revised, published and performed in relation to this complex web of social forces. Chapters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Jean Rhys demonstrate that by both reacting against and complying with the forces of repression, writers reaped personal and stylistic benefits for themselves and for society at large.

One may wonder that new ways of reading James Joyce continue to emerge, but as Jonathan Goldman and his fourteen contributors demonstrate, Joyce's key writings beg to be analyzed alongside Irish law and legal history. Together, these essays demonstrate how legal research elucidates the movements and motivations of Joyce's characters and the language and shape of his narratives.