The Novel and the Obscene : Sexual Subjects in American Modernism / Florence Dore.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dore, Florence, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (184 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

We have tended to think of American literary modernism as participating in the culture's general rejection of prudery, and how else are we to read modernists' forthright representations of sexual characters? The Novel and the Obscene challenges our vision of the era as sexually progressive by identifying a resonant silence at the heart of the modernist American novel. In spite of novelists' efforts to represent sexuality explicitly, this silence ("negative narration") reproduces censorship, rendering it symbolic at the moment of its legal demise. The Novel and the Obscene differs from current scholarship in law and literature, which positions law as the historical key that will unlock the ambiguous literary text. In examining the relation between obscene novels and sexual identity, The Novel and the Obscene instead illuminates the roles of both the novel and obscenity law in establishing sexual identity in American civic life.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Novel and the Symbolic

Part I Knowing

1 Guilty Reading: Stupidity and Sex in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

2 Ultimate Delicacy: Propriety and False Femininity in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House

Part II Seeing

3 Counting as Decent: Obscenity and Masculinity in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary

4 A Gulf of Silence: Richard Wright’s Native Son and Obscenity’s Racial Demand

Appendix: Legal Cases Cited

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-2532-X

OCLC:

1294424782