Project summary
If the readers of popular fiction in the twentieth century were, in the words of literary critic Q. D. Leavis, 'an unknown public,' then how much more opaque were the readers of obscene literature in all its forms?
Obscene reading formed a huge part of the market in books and magazines in this period.
Most histories of obscenity concentrate on the struggle for free speech on the part of a few famous writers - Emile Zola, James Joyce, or D. H. Lawrence, but very few aim to map out the nature of this market in its mundane, everyday operations, to examine who read what, and in what context.
Sub-projects include examining the attempts to ban obscene French literature in interwar Britain, and to examine how the British and French governments collaborated and differed in their attempts to do this.