Dirt for art's sake : books on trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita / Elisabeth Ladenson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ladenson, Elisabeth.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French literature--19th century--Censorship.

French literature.

English fiction--20th century--Censorship.

English fiction.

American fiction--20th century--Censorship.

American fiction.

Trials (Obscenity)--France--History--19th century.

Trials (Obscenity).

Trials (Obscenity)--Great Britain--History--20th century.

Trials (Obscenity)--United States--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (298 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface: Red Hot Chili Peppers

Acknowledgments

Prologue: History Repeats Itself

Chapter One. Gustave Flaubert: Emma Bovary Goes to Hollywood

Chapter Two. Charles Baudelaire: Florist of Evil

Chapter Three. James Joyce: Leopold Bloom's Trip to the Outhouse

Chapter Four. Radclyffe Hall: The Well of Prussic Acid

Chapter Five. D. H. Lawrence: Sexual Intercourse Begins

Chapter Six. Henry Miller: A Gob of Spit in the Face of Art

Chapter Seven. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolitigation

Epilogue: The Return of the Repressed

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780801466410

0801466415

9780801474101

0801474108

9780801460371

0801460379

OCLC:

726824182