Enforcing and Eluding Censorship (PDF)

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 "e;ways of censorship"e; - 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 "e;Discourse Regulation"e;, discusses instances of institutionalized and regulatory censorship and, conversely, forms of reaction against pressure and control. The second section, entitled "e;Textual and Ideological Manipulations"e;, 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.