Banned Books, Burned Books: Forbidden Literary Works

Begin the course with an introduction to the concept of literary censorship and examine why even authors as influential and esteemed as Shakespeare can fall prey to it. Meet some of the writers and editors who attempted to sanitize the bawdier parts of the Bard’s plays and discover where we get the term “bowdlerism.”

James Joyce’s Ulysses is considered the novel that ushered modernism into mainstream literature, yet its introduction to the world was ruthlessly contested. Get a brief overview of Joyce’s life and work, then dive into the story of how his modernist masterpiece was challenged and consider how the legal battles over his work shaped later censorship battles.

At the time of his death in 1930, British author D. H. Lawrence was widely viewed as one of the greatest writers of the English language. Yet, as you will see here, this popularity did not prevent some readers from taking offense to his frank depictions of sexuality, resulting in a censorship and an obscenity trial over his final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Step back in time to get the broader historical context for censorship and see how the cases of the 20th and 21st centuries fit into a much larger pattern of religious and moral pressure from the 12th century onward. Here, you will look at the influence of the Catholic Church and the colonial Puritans on the control of printed materials they found troubling or even heretical.

Meet Anthony Comstock, the relentless late-19th-century enforcer of Victorian codes of sexual propriety. His decades-long crusade for moral purity gave us a new term for censorship and his influence shaped the history of censorship in the United States—including the arrests, suicides, and destruction he proudly claimed as part of his legacy.

Here, look at the most extreme form of print censorship: the physical destruction of books deemed heretical, dangerous, or subversive. From the Protestant Reformation to Nazi Germany and beyond, you will see how the desire to stop the dissemination of various works has resulted in book burnings, violence, and even murder.