Author: Robert Darnton Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393242307 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
“Splendid. . . . [Darnton gives] us vivid, hard-won detail, illuminating narrative, and subtle, original insight.”—Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways. In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself incubated Diderot’s great Encyclopedie by hiding the banned project’s papers in his Paris townhouse. Relationships at court trumped principle in the Old Regime. Shaken by the Sepoy uprising in 1857, the British Raj undertook a vast surveillance of every aspect of Indian life, including its literary output. Years later the outrage stirred by the British partition of Bengal led the Raj to put this knowledge to use. Seeking to suppress Indian publications that it deemed seditious, the British held hearings in which literary criticism led to prison sentences. Their efforts to meld imperial power and liberal principle fed a growing Indian opposition. In Communist East Germany, censorship was a component of the party program to engineer society. Behind the unmarked office doors of Ninety Clara-Zetkin Street in East Berlin, censors developed annual plans for literature in negotiation with high party officials and prominent writers. A system so pervasive that it lodged inside the authors’ heads as self-censorship, it left visible scars in the nation’s literature. By rooting censorship in the particulars of history, Darnton's revealing study enables us to think more clearly about efforts to control expression past and present.
Author: Robert Darnton Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195144511 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 377
Book Description
The publishing industry in France in the years before the Revolution was a lively and sometimes rough-and-tumble affair, as publishers and printers scrambled to deal with (and if possible evade) shifting censorship laws and tax regulations, in order to cater to a reading public's appetite for books of all kinds, from the famous Encyclopédie, repository of reason and knowledge, to scandal-mongering libel and pornography. Historian and librarian Robert Darnton uses his exclusive access to a trove of documents-letters and documents from authors, publishers, printers, paper millers, type founders, ink manufacturers, smugglers, wagon drivers, warehousemen, and accountants-involving a publishing house in the Swiss town of Neuchatel to bring this world to life. Like other places on the periphery of France, Switzerland was a hotbed of piracy, carefully monitoring the demand for certain kinds of books and finding ways of fulfilling it. Focusing in particular on the diary of Jean-François Favarger, a traveling sales rep for a Swiss firm whose 1778 voyage, on horseback and on foot, around France to visit bookstores and renew accounts forms the spine of this story, Darnton reveals not only how the industry worked and which titles were in greatest demand, but the human scale of its operations. A Literary Tour de France is literally that. Darnton captures the hustle, picaresque comedy, and occasional risk of Favarger's travels in the service of books, and in the process offers an engaging, immersive, and unforgettable narrative of book culture at a critical moment in France's history.
Author: Dunya Mikhail Publisher: New Directions Publishing ISBN: 081122287X Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 96
Book Description
A stunning new collection by one of Iraq’s brightest poetic voices The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where “every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun.” Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author’s vivid illustrations — inspired by Sumerian tablets — are threaded throughout this powerful book.
Author: Alberto Lázaro Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443832529 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
This volume brings together twelve essays which explore European censorship of English literature in the last century. Taking into consideration the various social, political and historical contexts in which literary controls were imposed and the extent to which they were determined by national and international concerns, these essays comment on political and moral censorship, self-censorship, and the role of the translator as censor. Besides systematic state control, other hidden and insidious forms of censorship are also surveyed in the essays. This study considers why certain works and authors, many of them now regarded as canonical, were targeted in various states and often under opposing ideologies, such as those dominated by conservative Catholic morality and those governed by communism or socialism. The essays contain previously unpublished material, cover a wide range of authors – including Beckett, Eliot, Joyce and Orwell – and analyse diverse censorship systems operating across Europe, thus serving as a useful comparative resource. Despite the variety of structures of suppression, the study shows that certain common practices can be discerned across national borders and that general conclusions can be drawn about the complex and ambiguous nature of the state’s relationship with culture and about the immediate and long-term impact of censorship, not only on the author and publisher but on society as a whole. Finally, the essays are also significant for what they tell us about the survival of literature, despite the best efforts of the censors.
Author: Robert Darnton Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 9780393314427 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 468
Book Description
Robert Darnton's work is one of the main reasons that cultural history has become an exciting study central to our understanding of the past.
Author: Adam Parkes Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195097025 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
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, and Orlando dramatized 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 Censorship suggests that modern novelists, while shaped by their culture, attempted to reshape it.
Author: Joseph R. Hacker Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 081220509X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
The rise of printing had major effects on culture and society in the early modern period, and the presence of this new technology—and the relatively rapid embrace of it among early modern Jews—certainly had an effect on many aspects of Jewish culture. One major change that print seems to have brought to the Jewish communities of Christian Europe, particularly in Italy, was greater interaction between Jews and Christians in the production and dissemination of books. Starting in the early sixteenth century, the locus of production for Jewish books in many places in Italy was in Christian-owned print shops, with Jews and Christians collaborating on the editorial and technical processes of book production. As this Jewish-Christian collaboration often took place under conditions of control by Christians (for example, the involvement of Christian typesetters and printers, expurgation and censorship of Hebrew texts, and state control of Hebrew printing), its study opens up an important set of questions about the role that Christians played in shaping Jewish culture. Presenting new research by an international group of scholars, this book represents a step toward a fuller understanding of Jewish book history. Individual essays focus on a range of issues related to the production and dissemination of Hebrew books as well as their audiences. Topics include the activities of scribes and printers, the creation of new types of literature and the transformation of canonical works in the era of print, the external and internal censorship of Hebrew books, and the reading interests of Jews. An introduction summarizes the state of scholarship in the field and offers an overview of the transition from manuscript to print in this period.
Author: Norbert Bachleitner Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004519289 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
The influence of censorship on the intellectual and political life in the Habsburg Monarchy during the period under scrutiny can hardly be overstated. This study examines the institutional foundations, operating principles, and results of the censorial activity through analysis of the prohibition lists and examination of the censors themselves. The effects of censorship on the authors, publishers, and booksellers of the time are illustrated with the help of contemporary documents. Numerous case studies focus on individual works forbidden by the censors: Romanticists like Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann and even authors of classic German literature like Wieland, Goethe, and Schiller saw their works slashed, as did writers of popular French and English novels and plays. An annex documents the most important regulations along with a selection of censorial reports.
Author: Alireza Abiz Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0755634926 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
Censorship pervades all aspects of political, social and cultural life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Faced with strict state control of cultural output, Iranian authors and writers have had to adapt their work to avoid falling foul of the censors. In this pioneering study, Alireza Abiz offers an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of how censorship and the political order of Iran have influenced contemporary Persian literature, both in terms of content and tone. As censorship is unrecorded and not officially acknowledged in Iran, the author has examined newspaper records and conducted first-hand interviews with Iranian poets and writers. looking into the ways in which poets and writers attempt to subvert the codes of censorship by using symbolism and figurative language to hide their more controversial messages. A ground-breaking analysis, this book will be vital reading for anyone interested in contemporary cultural politics and literature in Iran.
Author: Robert Darnton
Author: Robert Darnton
Author: Nicole Moore
Author: Dunya Mikhail
Author: Alberto Lázaro
Author: Robert Darnton
Author: Adam Parkes
Author: Joseph R. Hacker
Author: Norbert Bachleitner
Author: Alireza Abiz