In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and their authors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories have to tell us about the works themselves and about a changing cultural climate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them as masterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966); she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Over the course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that had been circulating in the form of avant-garde heresy gradually became accepted as truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense. The first is captured in the formula ?art for art's sake??the notion that a work of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. The second is realism, vilified by its critics as ?dirt for dirt's sake.? In Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is closer to ?dirt for art's sake??the idea that the work of art may legitimately include the representation of all aspects of life, including the unpleasant and the sordid. Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these novels, among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and the 1997 remake directed by Adrian Lyne, and various attempts to translate de Sade's works and life into film, which faced similar censorship travails. Written with a keen awareness of ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical acumen and delightful wit.

In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and their authors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories have to tell us about the works themselves and about a changing cultural climate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them as masterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966); she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Over the course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that had been circulating in the form of avant-garde heresy gradually became accepted as truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense. The first is captured in the formula "art for art's sake"-the notion that a work of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. The second is realism, vilified by its critics as "dirt for dirt's sake." In Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is closer to -dirt for art's sake-"the idea that the work of art may legitimately include the representation of all aspects of life, including the unpleasant and the sordid. Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these novels, among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and the 1997 remake directed by Adrian Lyne, and various attempts to translate de Sade's works and life into film, which faced similar censorship travails. Written with a keen awareness of ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical acumen and delightful wit.

In this collection of short stories, the author invites us behind the scenes to the backrooms of the art world - into the artists' studios, the gallery offices and other out of bounds areas - to meet a diverse group of characters creating, acquiring, selling, forging, discovering and appreciating art. Set in places that Maria Tippett obviously knows well - Berlin, Vancouver, London, Chicago, Paris, Rome and Los Angeles - here is a unique insight into the making and marketing of works of arts, rich with human quirks and motivations. Through these stories, the author brings to life issues that traditional art historians and other commentators on the visual arts too often ignore.

Investigating the complex history of visual art?s engagement with literature, this collection demonstrates that the art of the book is a fully interdisciplinary and distinctly modern form. The essays in the collection develop new critical approaches to the analysis of twentieth-century bookworks and explore ways in which European writers and painters challenged the boundary between visual and linguistic expression in the content, production, and physical form of books. The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe offers a detailed examination of word-image relations in forms ranging from the livre d?artiste to personal diaries and almanacs. It analyzes innovative attempts to challenge familiar hierarchies between texts and images, to fuse different expressive media, and to reconceptualize traditional notions of ekphrasis. Giving consideration to the material qualities of books, the works discussed in this collection also test and celebrate the act of reading, while locating it in the context of other sensory experiences. Essays examine works by Dufy, Matisse, Beckett, Kandinsky, Braque, and Ponge, among other European artists and writers active during the twentieth century.

Offers new perspectives on Proust's complex and creative relation to a variety of art forms from different eras.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.

Lyra Ekström Lindbäck revisits the crucial distinction between literature and philosophy in Iris Murdoch's work to make a convincing case for understanding the particularity of literature and her insistence on the separation between the two. Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel makes a break with existing scholarship on Murdoch's philosophy and literature that ultimately re-states the philosophical value of literature, alongside literary aspects of philosophy. This book differs by deepening Murdoch's insistence on the differences between the disciplines, providing a consistent and polemical argument for the distinction between literature and philosophy more generally. Engaging thinkers such as Plato, Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Weil, and Cavell, Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel delves into the aesthetic characteristics that distinguish philosophy and literature. Through a discussion of the illusion of sense, the role of conceptual thinking in literature, the clash between epistemology and fiction, the artifice of tragedy, and the ambiguous morality of artistic inspiration and experience, this study reveals literature as essentially other to philosophy.