"Explores the defining relationship of literature to censorship across the globe"--

When Henry Vizetelly was imprisoned in 1889 for publishing the novels of Émile Zola in English, the problem was not just Zola’s French candour about sex – it was that Vizetelly’s books were cheap, and ordinary people could read them. Censored exposes the role that power plays in censorship. In twenty-five chapters focusing on a wide range of texts, including the Bible, slave narratives, modernist classics, comic books, and Chicana/o literature, Matthew Fellion and Katherine Inglis chart the forces that have driven censorship in the United Kingdom and the United States for over six hundred years, from fears of civil unrest and corruptible youth to the oppression of various groups – religious and political dissidents, same-sex lovers, the working class, immigrants, women, racialized people, and those who have been incarcerated or enslaved. The authors also consider the weight of speech, and when restraints might be justified. Rich with illustrations that bring to life the personalities and the books that feature in its stories, Censored takes readers behind the scenes into the courtroom battles, legislative debates, public campaigns, and private exchanges that have shaped the course of literature. A vital reminder that the freedom of speech has always been fragile and never enjoyed equally by all, Censored offers lessons from the past to guard against threats to literature in a new political era.

The library controls access to information by the very act of selecting materials, and must, therefore, deal with censorship on a basic level. The author has surveyed a response group of practicing librarians with questions that target some of the toughest questions librarians ever face. Curry's analysis focuses on the factors--personal beliefs, professional ethics, political pressures--that influence responses.

Those who love and live by art, tell us that it is the most exalted expression of civilized life. In this provocative new book Jonathan Dollimore argues that, far from confirming humane values, literature more often than not violates them. He begins with a polemical and witty attack on the spurious radicalism of some fashionable academic theories about desire and sexual dissidence. Dollimore then examines the ways in which the media, literary critics and the state, as well as these literary theorists, all deny or repress the disturbing and dangerous knowledge conveyed by literature. His own account of the volatile connections between aesthetics, desire, politics and censorship unfolds through topics such as homosexuality, bisexuality, sexual disgust, and the disturbing relations between art and inhumanity, and through brilliant insights into a wide range of authors including Euripides, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Yeats. Most persistently, this book is about how the experience of desire in life and art compromises our most cherished ethical beliefs. If this helps make art irresistible and of indispensable value, it follows too that there are reasonable grounds for wanting to censor it. This compelling and accessibly written book will be essential reading for students and scholars of literary, gender and cultural studies, and will have a major impact on debates about art, sexuality, censorship and the role of the intellectual.

Freedom of the printed word is a defining feature of the modern world. Yet censorship and the suppression of literature never cease, and remain topical issues even in the most liberal of democracies. Today, just as in the past, advances in media technology are followed by new regulatory mechanisms. Similarly, any attempt to control cultural expression inevitably spurs fresh discussions about freedom of speech. In Forbidden Literature scholars from a variety of disciplines address censorship's past and present, whether in liberal democracies or totalitarian regimes. Through in-depth case studies they trace a historical continuum in which literature reveals its two-sided nature: it demands both regulation and protection. The contributors investigate the logic of literary repression, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and analyze why it is thought essential to control literature. Moreover, the authors determine how literary practices are shaped and transformed by regulation and censorship.

“Splendid. . . . [Darnton gives] us vivid, hard-won detail, illuminating narrative, and subtle, original insight.”—Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways. In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself incubated Diderot’s great Encyclopedie by hiding the banned project’s papers in his Paris townhouse. Relationships at court trumped principle in the Old Regime. Shaken by the Sepoy uprising in 1857, the British Raj undertook a vast surveillance of every aspect of Indian life, including its literary output. Years later the outrage stirred by the British partition of Bengal led the Raj to put this knowledge to use. Seeking to suppress Indian publications that it deemed seditious, the British held hearings in which literary criticism led to prison sentences. Their efforts to meld imperial power and liberal principle fed a growing Indian opposition. In Communist East Germany, censorship was a component of the party program to engineer society. Behind the unmarked office doors of Ninety Clara-Zetkin Street in East Berlin, censors developed annual plans for literature in negotiation with high party officials and prominent writers. A system so pervasive that it lodged inside the authors’ heads as self-censorship, it left visible scars in the nation’s literature. By rooting censorship in the particulars of history, Darnton's revealing study enables us to think more clearly about efforts to control expression past and present.

Forbidden Fruit: The Censorship of Literature and Information for Young People was a two day conference held in Southport, UK in June 2008. This collection of papers from the conference will be of interest to teachers, school and public librarians, publishers, and other professionals involved in the provision of literature and information resources for young people, as well as to researchers and students. The proceedings draw together some of the latest research in this area from a number of fields, including librarianship, education, literature, and linguistics. The topics covered include translations and adaptations, pre-censorship by authors, publishers and editors, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans) materials, and the views of young people themselves. The papers included in the proceedings deal with a wide range of issues. Research student Lucy Pearson takes a historical perspective, considering the differences in the way in which two titles, Young Mother in the 1960s and Forever in the 1970s, handle the theme of teenage sexuality. John Harer from the United States and Elizabeth Chapman and Caroline Wright from the UK also deal with the controversial issue of teenage sexuality. Both papers are concerned with the censorship of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and trans) materials for young people, especially referring to issues faced by librarians in dealing with such resources in their respective countries. Another writer to examine the issue from a librarianship perspective is Wendy Stephens, who reports on her action research into students' reactions to book banning and censorship in the context of a twelfth-grade English literature research project. Taking one step back from the question of access to controversial materials, Cherie Givens reports on her doctoral research examining the often neglected issue of pre-censorship-- that is, restrictions which take place, usually as a result of pressure from editors and publishers, before materials reach the library shelves. Showing a different side of the publishing industry, Christopher Gruppetta writes from the perspective of a publisher keen to promote young adult fiction in Malta. His article demonstrates the huge strides which can take place in a relatively short period of time, even in a religiously conservative country. Talks by young adult authors were also included in the conference programme. Ioanna Kaliakatsou considers how self-censorship is exercised by authors and how attitudes have changed since the early twentieth century. Yet another point at which works might be censored is when they are translated or adapted. Evangelia Moula focuses on censorship in adaptations of classic Greek tragedies, while Helen T. Frank examines Australian children's fiction translated into French to highlight the process of 'purification' or 'sanitization' that can occur during translations.