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In this study of the reciprocities binding religion, politics, law, and literature, Debora Shuger offers a profoundly new history of early modern English censorship, one that bears centrally on issues still current: the rhetoric of ideological extremism, the use of defamation to ruin political opponents, the grounding of law in theological ethics, and the terrible fragility of public spheres. Starting from the question of why no one prior to the mid-1640s argued for free speech or a free press per se, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility surveys the texts against which Tudor-Stuart censorship aimed its biggest guns, which turned out not to be principled dissent but libels, conspiracy fantasies, and hate speech. The book explores the laws that attempted to suppress such material, the cultural values that underwrote this regulation, and, finally, the very different framework of assumptions whose gradual adoption rendered censorship illegitimate. Virtually all substantive law on language concerned defamation, regulating what one could say about other people. Hence Tudor-Stuart laws extended protection only to the person hurt by another's words, never to their speaker. In treating transgressive language as akin to battery, English law differed fundamentally from papal censorship, which construed its target as heresy. There were thus two models of censorship operative in the early modern period, both premised on religious norms, but one concerned primarily with false accusation and libel, the other with false belief and immorality. Shuger investigates the first of these models—the dominant English one—tracing its complex origins in the Roman law of iniuria through medieval theological ethics and Continental jurisprudence to its continuities and discontinuities with current U.S. law. In so doing, she enables her reader to grasp how in certain contexts censorship could be understood as safeguarding both charitable community and personal dignitary rights.
A bestselling art historian and a free speech advocate explore subtle new forms of censorship in the art world and beyond. ""In private, museum people have told me that self-censorship is indeed the order of the day. But it is quite rare for an official to speak about it in public. Self-censorship occurs behind closed doors. There are practically no whistle-blowers.""--Hans Haacke, conceptual artist known for his socially and politically engaged art If your idea of censorship is an anonymous bureaucrat in a government office exercising prudish control over "offensive" art and speech, wake up and smell the conglomeration. Censorship today is just as likely to be the result of a market force or a bandwidth monopoly as a line edit or the covering of a nude sculpture, and the current system of new technologies and economic arrangements has subtle, built-in mechanisms for suppressing free expression as powerful as any known in other centuries. In "Censoring Culture," the nationally known author of the ArtSpeak books and the head of the National Coalition Against Censorship's Arts Program bring together the latest thinking from art historians, cultural theorists, legal scholars, and psychoanalysts, as well as first-person accounts by artists and advocates, to give us a comprehensive understanding of censorship in a new century. Contributors include: - J.M. Coetzee, Judy Blume, and others on self-censorship - Hans Haacke on the marriage of art and money - DeeDee Halleck on the military-media-industrial complex - Marjorie Heins on violence and children - Randall Kennedy on the risks of regulating hate speech - Lawrence Lessig on creativity and copyright inthe electronic age - Judith Levine on shielding children from sex - Diane Ravitch on sensitivity guidelines for national testing - Douglas Thomas on hackers and hacking culture
"Explores the defining relationship of literature to censorship across the globe"--
In an exploration of antitheatrical incidents from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, Lisa A. Freeman demonstrates that at the heart of antitheatrical disputes lies a struggle over the character of the body politic that governs a nation and the bodies public that could be said to represent that nation.
In the late sixteenth through seventeenth centuries, England simultaneously developed a national market and a national literary culture. Writing at the Origin of Capitalism describes how economic change in early modern England created new patterns of textual production and circulation with lasting consequences for English literature. Synthesizing research in book and media history, including investigations of manuscript and print, with Marxist historical theory, this volume demonstrates that England's transition to capitalism had a decisive impact on techniques of writing, rates of literacy, and modes of reception, and, in turn, on the form and style of texts. Individual chapters discuss the impact of market integration on linguistic standardization and the rise of a uniform English prose; the growth of a popular literary market alongside a national market in cheap commodities; and the decline of literary patronage with the monarchy's loosening grip on trade regulation, among other subjects. Peddlers' routes and price integration, monopoly licenses and bills of exchange, all prove vital for understanding early modern English writing. Each chapter reveals how books and documents were embedded in wider economic processes, and as a result, how the origin of capitalism constituted a revolutionary event in the history of English literature.
This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. For historians of early modern England, turning to legal archives and learning more about legal procedure has seemed increasingly relevant to the project of understanding familial and social relations as well as political institutions, state formation, and economic change. Literary scholars and intellectual historians have also shown how classical forensic rhetoric formed the basis both of the humanist teaching of literary composition (poetry and drama) and of new legal epistemologies of fact-finding and evidence evaluation. In addition, the post-Reformation jurisdictional dominance of the common law produced new ways of drawing the boundaries between private conscience and public accountability. This Handbook brings historians, literary scholars, and legal historians together to build on and challenge these and similar lines of inquiry. Chapters in the Handbook consider the following topics in a variety of combinations: forensic rhetoric, poetics and evidence; humanist and legal learning; political and professional identities at the Inns of Court; poetry, drama, and visual culture; local governance and legal reform; equity, conscience, and religious law; legal transformations of social and affective relations (property, marriage, witchcraft, contract, corporate personhood); authorial liability (libel, censorship, press regulation); rhetorics of liberty, slavery, torture, and due process; nation, sovereignty, and international law (the British archipelago, colonialism, empire).
The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on the period of Shakespeare's career that will assist and stimulate scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than merely attempting to summarize the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, individual chapters seek to exemplify a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies currently used in historical research on the early modern period that can inform close analysis of literature. Different sections examine political history at both the national and local levels; relationships between intellectual culture and the early modern political imagination; relevant aspects of religious and social history; and facets of the histories of architecture, the visual arts, and music. Topics treated include the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere' and its relationship to drama during Shakespeare's lifetime; the role of historical narratives in shaping the period's views on the workings of politics; attitudes about the role of emotion in social life; cultures of honour and shame and the rituals and literary forms through which they found expression; crime and murder; and visual expressions of ideas of moral disorder and natural monstrosity, in printed images as well as garden architecture.
This book offers the first full study of the challenges posed to an emerging English nationalism that stemmed from the powerful appeal exerted by the leaders of the international Protestant cause. By considering a range of texts, including poetry, plays, pamphlets, and religious writing, the study reads this heroic tradition as a 'connected literary history,' a project shared by Protestants throughout Northern Europe, which opened up both collaboration among writers from these different regions and new possibilities for communal identification. The work’s central claim is that a pan-Protestant literary field existed in the period, which was multilingual, transnational, and ideologically charged. Celebrated leaders such as William of Orange posed a series of questions, especially for English Protestants, over the relationship between English and Protestant identity. In formulating their role as co-religionists, writers often undercut notions of alterity, rendering early modern conceptions of foreignness especially fluid and erasing national borders.
A discussion of the fascinating interplay between communication, politics and religion in early modern England suggesting a new framework for the politics of print culture. This book challenges the idea that the loss of pre-publication licensing in 1695 unleashed a free press on an unsuspecting political class, setting England on the path to modernity. England did not move from a position of complete control of the press to one of complete freedom. Instead, it moved from pre-publication censorship to post-publication restraint. Political and religious authorities and their agents continued to shape and manipulate information. Authors, printers, publishers and book agents were continually harassed. The book trade reacted by practicing self-censorship. At times of political calm, government and the book trade colluded in a policy of policing rather than punishment. The Restraint of the Press in England problematizes the notion of the birth of modernity, a moment claimed by many prominent scholars to have taken place at the transition from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. What emerges from this study is not a steady move to liberalism, democracy or modernity. Rather, after 1695, England was a religious and politically fractured society, in which ideas of the sovereignty of the people and the power of public opinion were being established and argued about.
This Companion explores the Bible's role and influence on individual writers, whilst tracing the key developments of Biblical themes and literary theory through the ages. An ambitious overview of the Bible's impact on English literature – as arguably the most powerful work of literature in history – from the medieval period through to the twentieth-century Includes introductory sections to each period giving background information about the Bible as a source text in English literature, and placing writers in their historical context Draws on examples from medieval, early-modern, eighteenth-century and Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist literature Includes many 'secular' or 'anti-clerical' writers alongside their 'Christian' contemporaries, revealing how the Bible's text shifts and changes in the writing of each author who reads and studies it