Media Reviews
A professor of French and comparative literature, Ladenson sets out to answer the question, 'How does an 'obscene' book become a 'classic'?' with this spry but exhaustive look at the history and culture surrounding the modern world's most controversial literature. Ladenson touches on numerous 'dirty' books, using a handful of landmark titles as jumping-off points for a wide-ranging survey: Madame Bovary, Les Fleurs du Mal, The Well of Loneliness, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Lolita. Using court records, novelists' letters, newspaper reviews and other books on the subject, Ladenson constructs a vivid composite of society's shifting relationship with such polarizing subjects as adultery, homosexuality and pedophilia-including the suppression thereof as well as the appetite therefor. Tracing the evolution of 'obscenity' from the 1850s to the late 20th century, Ladenson outlines the debates over 'art for art's sake,' as well as the province of realism, illustrating the rocky process of acceptance for the twin concepts and the literature they provoked. Witty, well-written and relevant, including fascinating details from the lives of writers, court cases as recent as the 1960s and as far-flung as Japan, and attempts to reinvent controversial works for contemporary audiences (such as two film versions of Lolita), this highly readable study should make scholars and book junkies as happy as pigs in lit. -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A witty and elegant study, written with an exceptional sensitivity to the multiple ironies regarding sex and censorship in literature. . . . With every text Ladenson so perceptively reads, she has something fresh and arresting to say. She is especially brilliant on Ulysses, along with Madame Bovary the most obvious work of genius under examination here. . . . Assuredly not an obvious work of genius is Lady Chatterley's Lover . . . and Ladenson's commentary on it is illuminating. . . . The chapter on Nabokov and Lolita is extremely funny: a chapter of accidents. . . . We still believe in censorship today. It's just that we're too hypocritical to call it censorship, and talk instead of 'inappropriate language' in regard to gender or ethnic stereotyping, and of the need to have our 'awareness raised'. Bah humbug, says Ladenson, in so many words. -Christopher Hart, Sunday Times (London), 31 December 2006
An absorbing study of a century's worth of literary obscenity trials. Between the landmark year of 1857, when Britain passed the Obscene Publications Act and France launched prosecutions against Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert, through the trials of Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Fanny Hill, Western culture completely overthrew its traditional concept of the relationship between art and morality, obliterating the very idea of literary obscenity. Out went the old-literature's duty to uphold the ideal-and in came the new: art for art's sake (exempt from moral judgment), and what Ladenson calls dirt for art's sake, art's duty to be realistic, particularly in sexuality. -Brian Bethune, Maclean's, 1 January 2007
Elisabeth Ladenson's witty meditation on literary obscenity pivots on 'irony, paradox, and absurdity.' How, she ruminates, can one generation's 'dirt' be another generation's 'art'? 'How does an obscene work become a classic?' It's a fascinating set of hows. Ladenson takes, as her principal texts, seven ambiguously obscene classic works of literature. . . . What adds freshness to her discussion is chapters on that infamous period of Gallic censorship when public prosecutor Ernest Pinard took Flaubert and Baudelaire to court. By so doing, he installed himself in the annals of literature-as one of its clowns. They also serve who makes fools of themselves for art. -John Sutherland, Washington Post, 28 January 2007
We have come to applaud transgression, Elisabeth Ladenson argues, but only so long as the values transgressed are different to our own. Discussions of Flaubert, Joyce, Nabokov, and Sade each illustrate the point well, as we see how their most controversial texts have been rewritten in print and film in order to moderate the original provocation. -Anthony Cummins, Times Literary Supplement, April 6, 2007
In witty analyses, she establishes common themes and cross-references from nine obscenity trials, revealing shifting sensibilities and legal rulings since 1857 in France, England, and the US, occasionally to comic effect. . . . Highly recommended. All readers; all levels. -Choice
With far-ranging erudition, a keen eye for analysis, and a great sense of humor, Elisabeth Ladenson looks at the real reasons behind the censorship of masterpieces like Madame Bovary and important but lousy books like The Well of Loneliness. She pinpoints many of the moralistic arguments that are once again rearing their ugly heads in this age of spying and 'Christian' militancy. The censorship of movies was already a recapitulation of the principles that had been applied to literature a century earlier. This book is so entertaining it made me laugh out loud at least once at some expertly skewered absurdity during every chapter. -Edmund White
This witty, exhilarating romp through a century and a half of literary culture offers many pleasures and discoveries. It contributes an important chapter to the study of modernism, it allows us to compare the different sensibilities of France, Britain, and the United States, and it deepens the ironies of literary history. Best of all, Elisabeth Ladenson provides a trenchant critique of both the absurdity of censorship and the absurdity of imagining that we will ever do away with censorship. Instead, she demonstrates-to the discomfort of hypocritical readers everywhere-how perennial, renewable, and irresistible is the impulse to ban someone else's speech. -David Halperin, W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan, author of Saint Foucault
Dirt for Art's Sake is a brilliant combination of literary sleuthing, cultural history, and just plain great storytelling. Why is it that the literary masterworks of the last two centuries have been prosecuted for obscenity-and that we continue to consider some words, images, and ideas to be subversive? Ranging through literature, film, history, and law, Elisabeth Ladenson's magnificent book suggests some answers. Witty, ironic, beautifully written, and massively entertaining, Dirt for Art's Sake easily straddles the worlds of literary page-turner and first-rate scholarship. All lovers of good writing should bow down before Ladenson. -Marjorie Heins, Free Expression Policy Project, Brennan Center for Justice
I agreed to blurb this book intending to skim a few pages in the normal manner of blurbists and then opine favorably in blurbese. What I did not bargain for is that I would not be able to put the book down, to my great enjoyment and edification. The book is totally engaging, a great read, delightfully unpretentious, and loaded with insight. Treat yourself. -William Ian Miller, University of Michigan, author of Faking It
This book is an intellectual tour de force that combines scholarly erudition with wit, analytical insight, and brilliant writing. Focusing specifically on the question of how works once banned as 'obscene' become classics, Elisabeth Ladenson engages the problems of the relationship between aesthetic value and moral content, high versus low culture, the obscenity of ideas versus the obscenity of language, and obscenity as a problem of accessibility. She demonstrates with care and precision the important historical shifts in obscenity law in France, England, and the U.S. as a story about the shifting importance of literature itself. An original and provocative book. -Lynne Huffer, Emory University, author of Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia and the Question of Difference
Elisabeth Ladenson writes with clarity, verve, and considerable wit. Dirt for Art's Sake explores changes in attitudes that not only reflect on social transformations but also raise questions about the changing role of literature. Comparisons with cases against movies add to the dimensions of this book and strengthen Ladenson's conclusions. -Rosemary Lloyd, author of Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life
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