A01=Chris Forster
Author_Chris Forster
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=ATFA
Category=DSBH
Category=JBFW
Category=NL-AP
Category=NL-DS
Category=NL-JF
COP=United States
Discount=15
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Format=BB
Format_Hardback
HMM=240
IMPN=Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN13=9780190840860
Language_English
PA=Available
PD=20181126
POP=New York
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
PUB=Oxford University Press Inc
SMM=18
Subject=Film- Tv & Radio
Subject=Literature: History & Criticism
Subject=Society & Culture : General
WG=462
WMM=163
Product details
- ISBN 9780190840860
- Format: Hardback
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 236 x 157 x 18mm
- Publication Date: 15 Nov 2018
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: New York, US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of figures like James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts twentieth century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and The Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. Judgments about obscenity, which hinged on understanding how texts were circulated and read, were often proxies for the changing place of literature in an age of new technological media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how "literary value" was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of obscenity in order to discover a history of technological media behind debates about moral corruption and sexual explicitness. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective "end of obscenity" for literature at the middle of the century, it argues, is not simply a product of cultural liberalization but of a changing media ecology.
Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity and novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism's obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (like T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (like Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.
Chris Forster is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University
