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Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism after Modernism (Refiguring Modernism) by Erik M. Bachman is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism after Modernism (Refiguring Modernism) about?

This comparative historical study explores the broad sociocultural factors at play in the relationships among U.S. obscenity laws and literary modernism and naturalism in the early twentieth century. Putting obscenity case law’s crisis of legitimation and modernism’s crisis of representation into dialogue, Erik Bachman shows how obscenity trials and other attempts to suppress allegedly vulgar writing in the United States affected a wide-ranging debate about the power of the printed word to incite emotion and shape behavior. Far from seeking simply to transgress cultural norms or sexual boundaries, Bachman argues, proscribed authors such as Wyndham Lewis, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, and James T. Farrell refigured the capacity of writing to evoke the obscene so that readers might become aware of the social processes by which they were being turned into mass consumers, voyeurs, and racialized subjects. Through such efforts, these writers participated in debates about the libidinal efficacy of language with a range of contemporaries, from behavioral psychologists and advertising executives to book cover illustrators, magazine publishers, civil rights activists, and judges. Focusin

Who reads Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism after Modernism (Refiguring Modernism)?

Author

Erik M. Bachman

Publisher

The Pennsylvania State University Press

Published

2018

Language

EN

ISBN

9780271081670

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Literary Criticism, Law