Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View

Abstract

Censorship and the limits of the literary: a global view, edited by Nicole Moore (Bloomsbury, 2015)This volume of essays, edited by literary historian Nicole Moore, explores the dynamic between literature and censorship. Moore describes her collaborative scholarly project in these terms: 'The essays ... engage with more than twelve countries or nation states, placing into revealing contiguity a set of case studies examining national regimes, publishing industries, book trades, reading contexts or authorial circumstances' (5)Her introduction proposes two possible approaches to reading Censorship and the limits of the literary. First, through the four-part 'chronologically-ordered' structure, beginning in the Enlightenment with Simon Burrows's essay on 'French Censorship on the Eve of the Revolution', through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the Cold War (Part III) and then 'the final, contemporary section [which] has much to say about our world right now' (7). Within this structure, the reader can also move easily across the book's global perspective, selecting chapters on a range of countries, including South Africa, Quebec, East Germany, Australia, China and Iran.The second approach recommended by Moore turns on 'the volume's reflect[ing] a moment of congruence, when new directions in a number of scholarly fields are converging' (2). This approach would work well for the specialist reader, one who is willing to engage with Foucault's theories relating to contemporary censorship scholarship and 'the degree to which, rather than removed and antithetical opposites, literature and censorship have been dialectical forms of culture, each actively defining the other in ongoing, agonistic engagement' (2). The 'scholarly fields' mentioned include various forms of literary studies, history, theatre, film, books and printing.The contributors' areas of expertise, and the accompanying case studies, focus on historical period and on place. For example, Peter McDonald's excellent essay on 'the Critic as Censor' deals with Apartheid South Africa, where censorship was 'always officially euphemized as "publications control"'. McDonald is also the author of The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009); in his essay in Moore's collection, he covers the white, universityeducated, predominantly male censors who acted as 'guardians of the literary'. These were men who allowed J.M. Coetzee into their 'Republic of Letters ... despite [his] obvious offensiveness towards the government' while excluding Wilbur Smith, writer of 'morally corrupting pulp fiction for the masses' (124).Christine Spittel's rewarding essay, 'Reading the Enemy', deals with East German censorship during the 1990s. …