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Essays & Studies 1993 - Literature & Censorship

edited by Nigel Smith, University of Oxford

ISBN: 0859913872 First published 1993 by D.S. Brewer

The impact of censorship practices upon literary production has always been a major cause of discussion. This collection of essays takes the best of recent approaches and adds some new material in a series of investigations.

Several essays explore official censorship - from government action against protest literature in the 1790s to interference in BBC screening. The objection that literary criticism does not explore the actual mechanisms of censorship is rebutted in discussions of literary language which attempted to circumvent censorship in the very battlefield of prohibition (the law courts), or in explorations of differences within censoring authorities concerning what should be banned. Other essays explore effects related to censorship, such as its opposite: the 'uncensoring' of salacious poetry once out of its author's control, and the effect on prose styles of cultures which permit press freedom.

Censorship is also related to the fabrication of literature (in this case supposed lost works by Shakespeare) in the context of competing political visions in 18th-century England. The more familiar relationship between sexuality and censorship is also explored in essays on Victorian and modern literature. The picture which emerges is of censorship as one part of a broader set of power relationships which constitute literature's interaction with society. Taken as a whole the essays underline an enduring aspect of the British identity.

Contents

Richard Wilson: The Kindly Ones: The Death of the Author in Shakespearean Athens
Lucasta Miller: The Shattered Violl: Print and Textuality in the 1640s
Paul Hammond: Censorship in the Manuscript Transmission of Restoration Poetry
Jonathan Bate: Faking It: Shakespeare and the 1790s
Jon Mee: 'Examples of Safe Printing': Censorship and Popular Radical Literature in the 1790s
Joseph Bristow: 'What if to her all this was said?': Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Silencing of 'Jenny'
Kate Flint: The Pools, the Depths, the Dark Places': Women, Censorship and the Body, 1894-1931
Martin Wiggins: 'Disgusted, Shepherd's Bush': Brimstone and Treacle at the BBC