Enforcing and Eluding Censorship

Enforcing and Eluding Censorship: British and Anglo-Italian Perspectives brings together a wide range of current work on literary, cultural and linguistic censorship by a team of fifteen contributors working in Italy, Britain and continental Europe. Censorship can take hold of a written text before or after its public appearance; it can strike the cultural item, as well as the very individual/s who created it; it can also catch in its net the agents responsible for its publication and diffusion (in the case of a printed text, authors, editors, printers, publishers, librarians and booksellers). It can be directed against a single person or against a group, an organization, a political party, or a religious confession. The different “ways of censorship” – how it was enforced or eluded in the Italian or Anglo-American worlds, and often in their mutual relations – are the topic of this volume, whose contents are divided into two main sections. The first, entitled “Discourse Regulation”, discusses instances of institutionalized and regulatory censorship and, conversely, forms of reaction against pressure and control. The second section, entitled “Textual and Ideological Manipulations”, debates some of the ways in which cultural products can be used to exert censorial influence upon society; among these, it shows how language and descriptions of language may provide a biased view of reality. All in all, the chapters in this volume highlight a notion of censorship that defies strict boundaries and definitions, thus challenging received ideas on cultural practices.