Modernism and the Theater of Censorship [Hardcover]

Adam Parkes investigates the literary and cultural implications of the censorship encountered by several modern novelists in the early twentieth century. He situates modernism in the context of this censorship, examining the relations between such authors as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf and the public controversies generated by their fictional explorations of modern sexual themes. These authors located obscenity at the level of stylistic and formal experiment.The Rainbow,Lady Chatterley's Lover,Ulysses, andOrlandodramatized problems of sexuality and expression in ways that subverted the moral, political, and aesthetic premises on which their censors operated. In showing how modernism evolved within a culture of censorship,Modernism and the Theater of Censorshipsuggests that modern novelists, while shaped by their culture, attempted to reshape it.

...Brilliantly researched....As a whole, this book is as significant a contribution to the literature of modern censorship as Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons'sThe Dame in the Kimono. --Choice

Thanks to Parkes's work we can better appreciate not just the modernists' daring but their exasperation in creating works of art in a culture of censorship. --Modern Philology

In addition to offering a valuable new assessment of modernism's significant role in the evolution of contemporary notions of gender and sexuality, Parkes's volume illuminates our understanding of the culture of censorship's unusual--and indeed, pivotal--role in literary history's journey to new vistas of artistic and social freedom. --Publishing Research Quarterly