Journal article
Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism
Critical inquiry, Vol.32(2), pp.341-361
2006
DOI: 10.1086/500706
Abstract
Waging what he characterized as '"a very cold, deliberate attack on censorship,'" Barney Rosset, owner of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review, decided in 1959 that he would issue an unexpurgated, commercial edition of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.1 Since its private publication in Italy in 1928, Lady Chatterley had been deemed legally obscene in both England and America, but Rosset knew that the cultural and legal climate had changed, particularly with the Supreme Court's 1957 decision in Roth v. United States, the first case in which the highest court considered whether obscenity constitutes an exception to First Amendment protection for freedom of speech and the press. The feminist engagement with pornography that followed upon the demise of Grove Press has produced an entire library of popular and academic polemics.5 But the abrupt apotheosis and collapse in the sixties of the dialectical entanglement between literary modernism and legal obscenity that laid the groundwork for these polemics has received surprisingly little attention, except from the lawyers who participated in it. Taking her title from Robin Morgan's famous essay, and framing her argument as a response to antipornography feminist Catharine MacKinnon, Ferguson returns to a selection of the modern literature that originally provoked the cultural and legal controversies that would culminate in the obscenity legislation of the postwar era.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism
- Creators
- Loren Glass
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Critical inquiry, Vol.32(2), pp.341-361
- DOI
- 10.1086/500706
- ISSN
- 0093-1896
- eISSN
- 1539-7858
- Publisher
- University of Chicago, acting through its Press
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2006
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984398048602771
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