Thefirst is captured in the formula “art for art's sake”-the notion that awork of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. Overthe course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that hadbeen circulating in the form of avant-garde heresy gradually becameaccepted as truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories haveto tell us about the works themselves and about a changing culturalclimate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them asmasterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966) she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade. In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the mostvisible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and theirauthors. Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2007, 304 p.
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