Obscene Modernism: Modernist literature, censorship and obscenity

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There is extensive research on individual cases of literary censorship, mostly by academic lawyers with an interest in the history of censorship legislation. There are also two recent books on the issue of modernist literature and obscenity, by film called Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (2000) which considers the issue of censorship from the late eighteenth century through to the 1960 Lady Chatterley's Lover trial and Dare entitled The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (2005) which looks specifically at American literature and sexual obscenity. A number of recent books have been published on the economic and coterie networks that controlled the circulation of modernist writing.However, there is no full-length study of the relationship between literary obscenity and the specific legal, publishing, and cultural context of the early twentieth century in Britain and the United States. This project will investigate the question of literary obscenity in the context of such networks of control. It follows on from my previous book, Modernism and Democracy: Literary culture, 1900-1930, (to be published by OUP in July, 2006) which analysed the relationship between modernist literature and ideas of political and legal democracy. In my new book, I will look at the relationship between literature and the law in the specific context of censorship debates. The book is necessary because it will do three new things: 1) provide a new context for understanding the legal and publishing networks that controlled the production and dissemination of modernist writing; 2) throw new light on the way that ideas about freedom of speech and freedom of the person altered in the period in relation to specific events and how these changes impacted on the understanding of literature; and 3) create a new perspective on the artistic aims of modernist writers.Aims and objectivesI aim to explore a series of interrelated research questions. Why were so many modernist texts censored in Britain and the US in the period 1900-1940 and what forms did this censorship take? What were the specific historical reasons for this conflict between literature and the law? How did censorship impact on ideas of freedom of speech and freedom of the individual? In what ways did these legal ideas impinge on debates about art and literature? How did the political context of the 1930s affect ideas of freedom of speech and the role of artistic language? Further, why did modernist writers want to explore literary obscenity? Why, for example, did James Joyce, who had already experienced censorship over Dubliners (1914), push his writing to entirely new levels of exuberant obscenity in Ulysses (1921)? Why did many of Joyce's literary contemporaries think that Ulysses was obscene? How did such questions inform the publishing and collaborative networks connecting modernist writers? Its potential applications and benefitsThe interrogation of this particular set of questions is both timely and necessary. Given current debates about the limits of freedom of speech in modern liberal secular societies I aim to construct a prehistory to such debates with reference to the specific issue of the relationship between freedom of speech and literary expression. The book will argue that modern conceptions of the special freedom of the literary text were put in place during the period 1900-1940, and that this was in response to a particular set of historical events. I envisage that this will be of interest not only to academics and students of modernist literature and culture, but for a general readership interested in the literary culture of the twentieth century.