Scandalous Fictions

The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere

Jago Morrison, Susan Watkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781403995841
• eBook ISBN: 9780230287846
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This study re-examines the twentieth-century novel as a form shaped by its problematic, often scandalous relation to the public sphere. Discussing ten texts against the challenges of their milieus, it considers twentieth-century fiction as a tradition of transgression, perennially caught between license and licentiousness, erudition and sedition.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: the Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere
• 1 The ‘nameless shamelessness’ of Ulysses: Libel and the Law of Literature
• 2 ‘The aristocracy of intellect’: Inversion and Inheritance in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
• 3 The Law and the Profits: the Case of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• 4 ‘You Reckon Folks Really Act Like That?’: Horror Films and the Work of Popular Culture in Richard Wright’s Native Son
• 5 Scandalous for being Scandalous: ‘monstrous huge fuck[s]’ and ‘slambanging big sodomies’ in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
• 6 Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People: the Novel and the Public Sphere
• 7 ‘Precious Gift/Piece of Shit’: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Revenge of History
• 8 Toni Morrison’s Beloved: the Scandal that Disturbed Domestic Tranquillity
• 9 Helen Darville, The Hand that Signed the Paper: Who is ‘Helen Demidenko’?
• 10 J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: Reading Race/Reading Scandal
• Afterword
• Index