In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the most
visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and
their authors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal
histories have to tell us about the works themselves and about a
changing cultural climate that first treated them as filth and
later celebrated them as masterpieces?
Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was
tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in
the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966);
she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well
of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita,
and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Over the course of roughly a
century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that had been circulating in the
form of avant-garde heresy gradually became accepted as truisms,
and eventually as grounds for legal defense. The first is captured
in the formula "art for art's sake" the notion that a work of art
exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. The second
is realism, vilified by its critics as "dirt for dirt's sake." In
Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is closer to dirt for
art's sake "the idea that the work of art may legitimately include
the representation of all aspects of life, including the unpleasant
and the sordid.
Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these novels,
among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary, Stanley Kubrick's
Lolita and the 1997 remake directed by Adrian Lyne, and various
attempts to translate de Sade's works and life into film, which
faced similar censorship travails. Written with a keen awareness of
ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the
legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical
acumen and delightful wit."
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