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.

In this first volume of the 1877 work that established him as England's leading authority on pornography, Henry Spencer Ashbee describes scores of "curious, uncommon and erotic books" that were banned or otherwise prohibited from legitimate sale during the Victorian era... and some even until the 1960s. Included in this far-reaching volume are such "gentlemen only" titles as Exhibition of Female Flagellants, The Battles of Venus, and A Cabinet of Amorous Curiosities. This catalog of mostly forgotten works is an invaluable-and highly entertaining-resource for bibliophiles, students of erotica, and collectors of Victoriana. British book collector, travel writer, and bibliographer HENRY SPENCER ASHBEE (1834-1900), aka Pisanus Fraxi, is thought by some to have authored the notorious Victorian sexual memoir My Secret Life.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Attributed to the Apostles & their Disciples. BANNED - after violent disputes by Bishops. SENSATIONAL - Joseph's shock at girl in his care pregnant DISCOVER - Jesus as a child makes clay animals & birds walk, fly & eat, He is taken as a sorcerer OUTRAGE - Jesus causes those he dislikes to die. "we will not allow him to go out; for everyone who displeases him is killed." REVEALED - Joseph is bad carpenter. Jesus corrects miraculously items "not properly made by Joseph" These Gospels fill a great void in the early life of the Saviour. It is consistent with every sincere Christian's faith to believe He had the power to perform the miracles here ascribed. E. Hancock: "I as an advocate of free thought dispute the authority of the ignorant who suppressed these Gospels & excluded them from the New Testament, of which they formed a part & were venerated during the first 400 yrs of the Christian Era. You only possess HALF THE TESTAMENT. READ THE COMPLETED BOOK.

Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-si?cle novel of formation in France. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen's masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie st?rile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, Fran?ois Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, many of which have rarely been studied, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen's reading habits. Against this cultural backdrop, he illuminates all that was at stake in representations of the male reader by prominent novelists of the period, including Jules Vall?s, Paul Bourget, Maurice Barr?s, Andr? Gide, and Marcel Proust. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Fin-de-si?cle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how Gide and Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-si?cle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.

A study of the conditions of the production and distribution of literature from the fall of the Roman Empire to the close of the seventeenth century.