Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature

Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature PDF Author: Robert Darnton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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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.

Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature

Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature PDF Author: Robert Darnton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

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.

A Literary Tour de France

A Literary Tour de France PDF Author: Robert Darnton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195144511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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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.

The Censor, the Editor, and the Text

The Censor, the Editor, and the Text PDF Author: Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812240115
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
In The Censor, the Editor, and the Text, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin examines the impact of Catholic censorship on the publication and dissemination of Hebrew literature in the early modern period. Hebrew literature made the transition to print in Italian print houses, most of which were owned by Christians. These became lively meeting places for Christian scholars, rabbis, and the many converts from Judaism who were employed as editors and censors. Raz-Krakotzkin examines the principles and practices of ecclesiastical censorship that were established in the second half of the sixteenth century as a part of this process. The book examines the development of censorship as part of the institutionalization of new measures of control over literature in this period, suggesting that we view surveillance of Hebrew literature not only as a measure directed against the Jews but also as a part of the rise of Hebraist discourse and therefore as a means of integrating Jewish literature into the Christian canon. On another level, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text explores the implications of censorship in relation to other agents that participated in the preparation of texts for publishing—authors, publishers, editors, and readers. The censorship imposed upon the Jews had a definite impact on Hebrew literature, but it hardly denied its reading, in fact confirming the right of the Jews to possess and use most of their literature. By bringing together two apparently unrelated issues—the role of censorship in the creation of print culture and the place of Jewish culture in the context of Christian society—Raz-Krakotzkin advances a new outlook on both, allowing each to be examined through the conceptual framework usually reserved for the other.

Censorship and the Limits of the Literary

Censorship and the Limits of the Literary PDF Author: Nicole Moore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150133039X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
"Explores the defining relationship of literature to censorship across the globe"--

The Great Cat Massacre

The Great Cat Massacre PDF Author: Robert Darnton
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465010482
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.

The Iraqi Nights

The Iraqi Nights PDF Author: Dunya Mikhail
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 081122287X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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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.

Medicine and the Inquisition in the Early Modern World

Medicine and the Inquisition in the Early Modern World PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004386467
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Medicine and the Inquisition offers a wide-ranging and subtle account of the role played by the Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in shaping medical learning and practice in the early modern world.

Censorship across Borders

Censorship across Borders PDF Author: Alberto Lázaro
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443832529
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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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.

Modernism and the Theater of Censorship

Modernism and the Theater of Censorship PDF Author: Adam Parkes
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195097025
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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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.

The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-revolutionary France

The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-revolutionary France PDF Author: Robert Darnton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393314427
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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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.