Censorship and the Limits of the Literary

[A] remarkable collection ... The strength of this book lies in its range of research, with twelve nation states across four centuries being explored ... An important contribution to the scholarship, providing a wealth of original and engaging research. Times Literary Supplement Nicole Moore, an expert on censorship, has put together a remarkable collection of erudite and thoroughly researched case studies that bust open prevailing ideas about the history of censorship since the Enlightenment. Tracking the course of subversive writing-from pamphleteering to jumping the Great Firewall-these essays survey four centuries of state efforts to squelch literary expression in Europe, America, Asia and Australia. From the ancien regime to the Arab Spring, collectively the authors survey twelve national stages to argue that the dance of literature and censorship presents a complex performance that at once sequesters and encourages suspicious relations between the state and its discontents. Whether overt or soft and self-imposed, censorship imbricates the law and art, casting itself as crucial to the invention of literature as a concept. Censorship exceeds the usual suspects: prigs, prudes, priests, police. It's very elusiveness a sign of its debt to literary thinking. Paula Rabinowitz, Professor of English, University of Minnesota, USA, and author of American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (2014) This stimulating collection explores the ways literature and censorship can be mutually constitutive, rather than straightforwardly opposing forces. Contributors examine the dialectic of literature and censorship in contexts ranging from ancient regime France to apartheid South Africa, from the Dutch East Indies to East Germany, from Regency England to contemporary Egypt. Nicole Moore's excellent introduction synthesizes the insights of recent work in the field and marks out future possibilities. Christopher Hilliard, Professor of History, The University of Sydney, Australia