Freedom of the printed word is a defining feature of the modern world. Yet censorship and the suppression of literature never cease, and remain topical issues even in the most liberal of democracies. Today, just as in the past, advances in media technology are followed by new regulatory mechanisms. Similarly, any attempt to control cultural expression inevitably spurs fresh discussions about freedom of speech.

In Forbidden Literature scholars from a variety of disciplines address censorship's past and present, whether in liberal democracies or totalitarian regimes. Through in-depth case studies they trace a historical continuum in which literature reveals its two-sided nature: it demands both regulation and protection. The contributors investigate the logic of literary repression, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and analyze why it is thought essential to control literature. Moreover, the authors determine how literary practices are shaped and transformed by regulation and censorship.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I Literature in court
  • 1. Only a bullet through the heart can stop a lesbian vampire
    • Emmy Carell’s novel Kan Mænd undværes? (1921)
  • 2. The case against Lady Chatterley’s Lover 45
    • The 1959 Obscene Publications Act as a New Critical subtext
  • 3. The sadist housewife
    • Asta Lindgren and the Swedish business of pornographic literature in the late 1960s
  • 4. So bad it should be banned
    • Judging the aesthetic of comics
• II Contingencies of censorship
  • 5. Risen from the ashes
    • Black magic and secret manuscripts in the parish of Burseryd-Sandvik
  • 6. Some aesthetic side effects of copyright
  • 7. ‘A Romanian Solzhenitsyn’
    • Censorship and Paul Goma’s Ostinato (1971)
• III Censorship and politics
  • 8. Poison, literary vermin, and misguided youths
    • Descriptions of immoral reading in early twentieth-century Sweden
  • 9. Cultural policy as biopolitics
    • The case of Arthur Engberg
  • 10. Protecting books from readers
    • Children in Finnish public libraries, 1930–1959
  • 11. Truth, knowledge, and power
    • Censorship and censoring policies in the Swedish public library system
• References
• About the authors