1st Edition

Obscenity, Psychoanalysis and Literature Lawrence and Joyce on Trial

By William Simms Copyright 2022
180 Pages
by Routledge

180 Pages
by Routledge

180 Pages
by Routledge

Obscenity, Psychoanalysis and Literature offers a fascinating psychoanalytic reading of four landmark obscenity trials involving the texts of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce. By tracing the legal histories of Lawrence and Joyce, from censorship to their eventual redemption and transformation into champions of sexual freedom, the book draws a narrative of changing legal, literary and cultural... Read more

Part I. The Woman  All The Women are One Woman  1. Methuen Vs Methuen  2. The Law of the Jungerl  Part II. The Truth Father, Can't You See I'm Writing  3. Woolsey’s Pharmacy  4. The Triumph of ‘Life’

Biography

William Simms received the President’s Doctoral Scholar Award from the University of Manchester, UK, where he completed his Ph.D. He is an interdisciplinary researcher, interrogating the intersections between literary, legal and psychoanalytic discourses.

"This bold and provocative new book draws on psychoanalysis to call into doubt many of the fundamental and common-sense assumptions about how censorship works and what it is for. William Simms contests standard accounts of these trials as straightforwardly repressive or enlightened. Instead, he shows how the outcome of the trials was much less important than the modes of desire and enjoyment that the trials articulated, and the mechanisms exercised by literary criticism and other discourses to regulate desire and enjoyment. Obscenity, Psychoanalysis and Literature is a work of great fluency and genuine invention." - Peter Buse, Dean of the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool