The twelve essays in this edited collection examine the experience of reading, from the late medieval period to the twentieth century. Central to the theme of the book is the role of materiality: how the physical object – book, manuscript, libretto – affects the experience of the person reading it.

This comparative historical study explores the broad sociocultural factors at play in the relationships among U.S. obscenity laws and literary modernism and naturalism in the early twentieth century. Putting obscenity case law’s crisis of legitimation and modernism’s crisis of representation into dialogue, Erik Bachman shows how obscenity trials and other attempts to suppress allegedly vulgar writing in the United States affected a wide-ranging debate about the power of the printed word to incite emotion and shape behavior. Far from seeking simply to transgress cultural norms or sexual boundaries, Bachman argues, proscribed authors such as Wyndham Lewis, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, and James T. Farrell refigured the capacity of writing to evoke the obscene so that readers might become aware of the social processes by which they were being turned into mass consumers, voyeurs, and racialized subjects. Through such efforts, these writers participated in debates about the libidinal efficacy of language with a range of contemporaries, from behavioral psychologists and advertising executives to book cover illustrators, magazine publishers, civil rights activists, and judges. Focusing on case law and the social circumstances informing it, Literary Obscenities provides an alternative conceptual framework for understanding obscenity’s subjugation of human bodies, desires, and identities to abstract social forces. It will appeal especially to scholars of American literature, American studies, and U.S. legal history.

The popular yet complex work of Joseph Conrad has attracted much critical attention over the years, from the perspectives of postcolonial, modernist, cultural and gender studies. This guide to his compelling work presents: an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Conrad’s texts, from publication to the present an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Conrad’s life and work, situated in a broader critical history cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Joseph Conrad and seeking not only a guide to his works, but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

This book traces the literary friendship between Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells from their early correspondence through to the differences that caused their estrangement, including their respective responses to the First World War. It thus gives an overview of the literary scene in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period.

Challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernismIn this ground-breaking study, Jonathan Wild investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism. In the hands of this generation, which included writers such as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Beatrix Potter, and H.G. Wells, the new century presented a unique opportunity to fashion innovative books for fresh audiences. Wild traces this literary innovation by conceptualising the focal points of his study as branches of one of the new department stores that epitomized Edwardian modernity.a These adepartments war and imperialism, the rise of the lower middle class, childrens literature, technology and decadence, and the condition of England offer both discrete and interconnected ways in which to understand the distinctiveness and importance of the Edwardian literary scene. Overall, The Great Edwardian Emporium offers a long-overdue investigation into a decade of literature that provided the cultural foundation for the coming century.

Published to accompany exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery, London, 19/6 - 17/8 1997.