This is the third volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson's comprehensive four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives in the British Library and the Royal Archives at Windsor. Focusing on plays we know, plays we have forgotten, and plays which were silenced for ever, Censorship of British Drama demonstrates the extent to which censorship shaped the theatre voices of this decade. The book charts the early struggles with Royal Court writers such as John Osborne and with Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop; the stand-offs with Samuel Beckett and with leading American dramatists; the Lord Chamberlain's determination to keep homosexuality off the stage, which turned him into a laughing stock when he was unable to prevent a private theatre club in London's West End from staging a series of American plays he had banned, including Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and the Lord Chamberlain's attempts to persuade the government to give him new powers and to rewrite the law. This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/SEEA6021

Since the mid-2000s, public opinion and debate in China have become increasingly common and consequential, despite the ongoing censorship of speech and regulation of civil society. How did this happen? In The Contentious Public Sphere, Ya-Wen Lei shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China-one the state must now endeavor to control. Lei examines the influence this unruly sphere has had on Chinese politics and the ways that the state has responded. Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to influence the public agenda, demand accountability from the government, and organize around the concepts of law and rights. She demonstrates how citizens came to understand themselves as legal subjects, how legal and media professionals began to collaborate in unexpected ways, and how existing conditions of political and economic fragmentation created unintended opportunities for political critique, particularly with the rise of the Internet. The emergence of this public sphere-and its uncertain future-is a pressing issue with important implications for the political prospects of the Chinese people. Investigating how individuals learn to use public discourse to influence politics, The Contentious Public Sphere offers new possibilities for thinking about the transformation of state-society relations.

How did writers convey ideas under the politically repressive conditions of state socialism? Did the perennial strategies to outwit the censors foster creativity or did unintentional self-censorship lead to the detriment of thought? Drawing on oral history and primary source material from the Editorial Board of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and state science policy documents, Libora Oates-Indruchova explores to what extent scholarly publishing in state-socialist Czechoslovakia and Hungary was affected by censorship and how writers responded to intellectual un-freedom. Divided into four main parts looking at the institutional context of censorship, the full trajectory of a manuscript from idea to publication, the author and their relationship to the text and language, this book provides a fascinating insight into the ambivalent beneficial and detrimental effects of censorship on scholarly work from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89 also brings the historical censorship of state-socialism into the present, reflecting on the cultural significance of scholarly publishing in the light of current debates on the neoliberal academia and the future of the humanities.

As movies took the country by storm in the early twentieth century, Americans argued fiercely about whether municipal or state authorities should step in to control what people could watch when they went to movie theaters, which seemed to be springing up on every corner. Many who opposed the governmental regulation of film conceded that some entity-boards populated by trusted civic leaders, for example-needed to safeguard the public good. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NB), a civic group founded in New York City in 1909, emerged as a national cultural chaperon well suited to protect this emerging form of expression from state incursions. Using the National Board's extensive files, Monitoring the Movies offers the first full-length study of the NB and its campaign against motion-picture censorship. Jennifer Fronc traces the NB's Progressive-era founding in New York; its evolving set of "standards" for directors, producers, municipal officers, and citizens; its "city plan," which called on citizens to report screenings of condemned movies to local officials; and the spread of the NB's influence into the urban South. Ultimately, Monitoring the Movies shows how Americans grappled with the issues that arose alongside the powerful new medium of film: the extent of the right to produce and consume images and the proper scope of government control over what citizens can see and show.

Those who love and live by art tell us that it is the most exalted expression of civilized life. In this provocative new book Jonathan Dollimore argues that, far from confirming humane values, literature more often than not violates them.

He begins with a polemical and witty attack on the spurious radicalism of some fashionable academic theories about desire and sexual dissidence. Dollimore then examines the ways in which the media, literary critics and the state, as well as these literary theorists, all deny or repress the disturbing and dangerous knowledge conveyed by literature.

His own account of the volatile connections between aesthetics, desire, politics and censorship unfolds through topics such as homosexuality, bisexuality, sexual disgust, and the disturbing relations between art and inhumanity, and through brilliant insights into a wide range of authors including Euripides, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Yeats.

Most persistently, this book is about how the experience of desire in life and art compromises our most cherished ethical beliefs; how it sets dissident desire against not just oppressive social life, but also against what are widely agreed to be the necessary limits of civilization itself. If this helps make art irresistible and of indispensable value, it follows too that there are reasonable grounds for wanting to censor it.

This compelling and accessibly written book will be essential reading for students and scholars of literary, gender and cultural studies, and will have a major impact on debates about art, sexuality, censorship and the role of the intellectual.

WikiLeaks is famous-or infamous-for publishing secret material, including classified government documents, confidential videos and emails, and information leaked by whistleblowers, some of them anonymous, others revealing their identities. WikiLeaks claims to have compiled a database of more than ten million "forbidden" documents. Its founder and leader, Australian activist Julian Assange proclaims that the public is entitled to the truth and that "information wants to be free." WikiLeaks activities have polarized opinion, with some claiming its operations are traitorous and harmful, and others defending its releases as necessary exposure of wrongdoing. In WikiLeaking: The Ethics of Secrecy and Exposure, professional philosophers with diverse opinions and backgrounds deliver their provocative insights into WikiLeaks. If leaking secrets sometimes causes harm, can this harm be outweighed by the benefit of more people knowing the truth? How much of WikiLeaks information is true, and does it matter that some of it might be erroneous or misleading through lack of context? Is the prevalence of leaking an automatic outcome of the value of free expression, as enshrined in the First Amendment? If it's wrong to lie, does this imply that it's always right to speak the truth? Does selective media bias require to be countered by unpredictable leaking? Can there be too much information? And if so, how can citizens protect themselves against information overload? WikiLeaks activists are guided by a code of ethics. How does this compare with the professional ethics of conventional journalists? When French politician Emmanuel Macron included deliberate falsehoods in his emails, knowing they would be leaked, he showed the relation between leaking and "bullshit," as defined by Harry Frankfurt. Can we expect the prevalence of leaking to increase the volume of bullshit? The existence of government necessitates the practice of subterfuge and double-dealing by statesmen, but the culture of democracy calls for transparency. How can we fix the boundary between necessary deception and the public's "right to know"? Leaking exposes what some powerful person wants to be kept secret. Is leaking always justified whenever that person wants to keep their own immoral actions secret, and is leaking not justified when the keeper of secrets has done nothing wrong?

'Censorship may have to do with literature', Nadine Gordimer once said, 'but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.'
As the history of many repressive regimes shows, this vital borderline has seldom been so clearly demarcated. Just how murky it can sometimes be is compellingly exemplified in the case of apartheid South Africa. For reasons that were neither obvious nor historically inevitable, the apartheid censors were not only the agents of the white minority government's repressive anxieties about the medium of print. They were also officially-certified guardians of the literary. This book is centrally about the often unpredictable cultural consequences of this paradoxical situation.
Peter D. McDonald brings to light a wealth of new evidence - from the once secret archives of the censorship bureaucracy, from the records of resistance publishers and writers' groups both in the country and abroad - and uses extensive oral testimony. He tells the strangely tangled stories of censorship and literature in apartheid South Africa and, in the process, uncovers an extraordinarily complex web of cultural connections linking Europe and Africa, East and West.
The Literature Police affords a unique perspective on one of the most anachronistic, exploitative, and racist modern states of the post-war era, and on some of the many forms of cultural resistance it inspired. It also raises urgent questions about how we understand the category of the literary in today's globalized, intercultural world.

With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways. In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself incubated Diderot's great Encyclopedie by hiding the banned project's papers in his Paris townhouse. Relationships at court trumped principle in the Old Regime. Shaken by the Sepoy uprising in 1857, the British Raj undertook a vast surveillance of every aspect of Indian life, including its literary output. Years later the outrage stirred by the British partition of Bengal led the Raj to put this knowledge to use. Seeking to suppress Indian publications that it deemed seditious, the British held hearings in which literary criticism led to prison sentences. Their efforts to meld imperial power and liberal principle fed a growing Indian opposition. In Communist East Germany, censorship was a component of the party program to engineer society. Behind the unmarked office doors of Ninety Clara-Zetkin Street in East Berlin, censors developed annual plans for literature in negotiation with high party officials and prominent writers. A system so pervasive that it lodged inside the authors' heads as self-censorship, it left visible scars in the nation's literature. By rooting censorship in the particulars of history, Darnton's revealing study enables us to think more clearly about efforts to control expression past and present.

Political races in the United States rely heavily on highly paid political consultants. In Building a Business of Politics, Adam Sheingate traces the history of political consultants from its origins in the publicity experts and pollsters of the 1920s and 1930s to the strategists and media specialists of the 1970s who transformed political campaigns into a highly profitable business. Today, consultants command a hefty fee from politicians as they turn campaign cash from special interest groups and wealthy donors into the advertisements, polls, and direct mail solicitations characteristic of modern campaigns. The implications of this system on the state of American democracy are significant: a professional political class stands between the voters and those who claim to represent them. Building a Business of Politics is both a definitive account of the consulting profession and a powerful reinterpretation of how political professionals reshaped American democracy in the modern era.

Better Left Unsaid is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor's knife-the Victorian novel and classical Hollywood film-this book reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art. As much as Victorianism is equated with such cultural impulses as repression and prudery, few scholars have explored the Victorian novel as a "censored" commodity-thanks, in large part, to the indirectness and intangibility of England's literary censorship process. This indirection stands in sharp contrast to the explicit, detailed formality of Hollywood's infamous Production Code of 1930. In comparing these two versions of censorship, Nora Gilbert explores the paradoxical effects of prohibitive practices. Rather than being ruined by censorship, Victorian novels and Hays Code films were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them.

For more than four hundred years, the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum struck terror into the hearts of authors, publishers and booksellers around the world, while arousing ridicule and contempt from many others, especially those in Protestant and non-Christian circles. Biased, inconsistent and frequently absurd in its attempt to ban objectionable texts of every conceivable description - with sometimes fatal consequences - the Index also reflected the deep learning and careful consideration of many hundreds of intellectual contributors over the long span of its storied evolution. This book constitutes the first full study of the Index of Prohibited Books to be published in English. It examines the reasons behind the Church's attempts to censor religious, scientific and artistic works, and considers not only why this most sustained of campaigns failed, but what lessons can be learned for today's debates over freedom of expression and cancel culture.

The twenty-second Munk Debate pits acclaimed journalist, professor, and ordained minister Michael Eric Dyson and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg against renowned actor and writer Stephen Fry and University of Toronto professor and author Jordan Peterson to debate the implications of political correctness and freedom of speech. Is political correctness an enemy of free speech, open debate, and the free exchange of ideas? Or, by confronting head-on the dominant power relationships and social norms that exclude marginalized groups are we creating a more equitable and just society? For some the argument is clear. Political correctness is stifling the free and open debate that fuels our democracy. It is also needlessly dividing one group from another and promoting social conflict. Others insist that creating public spaces and norms that give voice to previously marginalized groups broadens the scope of free speech. The drive towards inclusion over exclusion is essential to creating healthy, diverse societies in an era of rapid social change.

Examining a phenomenon that is sweeping the country, Cancel This Book shines the spotlight on the suppression of open and candid debate. The public shaming of individuals for actual or perceived offenses, often against emerging notions of proper racial and gender norms and relations, has become commonplace. In a number of cases, the shaming is accompanied by calls for the offending individuals to lose their jobs, positions, or other status. Frequently, those targeted for "cancellation" simply do not know the latest, ever-changing norms (often related to language) that they are accused of transgressing-or they have honest questions about issues that have been deemed off-limits for debate and discussion. Cancel This Book offers a unique perspective from Dan Kovalik, a progressive author who supports the ongoing movements for racial and gender equality and justice, but who is concerned about the prevalence of "cancelling" people, and especially of people who are well-intentioned and who are themselves allied with these movements. While many progressives believe that "cancelling" others is a form of activism and holding others accountable, Cancel This Book argues that "cancellation" is oftentimes counter-productive and destructive of the very values which the "cancellers" claim to support. And indeed, we now see instances in the workplace where employers are using this spirt of "cancellation" to pit employees against each other, to exert more control over the workforce and to undermine worker and labor solidarity. Kovalik observes that many progressives are quietly opposed to this "Cancel Culture" and to many instances of "cancellation" they witness, but they are afraid to air these concerns publicly lest they themselves be "cancelled." The result is the suppression of open debate about important issues involving racial and gender matters, and even issues related to how to best confront the current COVID-19 pandemic. While people speak in whispers about their true feelings about such issues, critical debate and discussion is avoided, resentments build, and the movement for justice and equality is ultimately disserved.