By Collette Colligan
From 1890 to 1960, some of Anglo-America’s most heated
cultural contests over books, sex, and censorship were staged not at home, but
abroad in the City of Light. Paris, with its extraordinary liberties of
expression, became a special place for interrogating the margins of sexual
culture and literary censorship, and a wide variety of English language “dirty
books” circulated through loose expatriate publishing and distribution
networks.
A Publisher’s Paradise explores the political and literary dynamics that gave rise to this expatriate cultural flourishing, which included everything from Victorian pornography to the most daring and controversial modernist classics. Colette Colligan tracks the British and French politicians and diplomats who policed Paris editions of banned books and uncovers offshore networks of publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers. She looks closely at the stories the “dirty books” told about this publishing haven and the smut peddlers and literary giants it brought together in transnational cultural formations. The book profiles an eclectic group of expatriates living and publishing in Paris, from relatively obscure figures such as Charles Carrington, whose list included both The Picture of Dorian Gray and the pornographic novel Randiana, to bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, famous for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922.
A Publisher’s Paradise is a compelling exploration of the little-known history of foreign pornography in Paris and the central role it played in turning the city into a modernist outpost for literary and sexual vanguardism, a reputation that still lingers today in our cultural myths of midnight in Paris.
A Publisher’s Paradise explores the political and literary dynamics that gave rise to this expatriate cultural flourishing, which included everything from Victorian pornography to the most daring and controversial modernist classics. Colette Colligan tracks the British and French politicians and diplomats who policed Paris editions of banned books and uncovers offshore networks of publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers. She looks closely at the stories the “dirty books” told about this publishing haven and the smut peddlers and literary giants it brought together in transnational cultural formations. The book profiles an eclectic group of expatriates living and publishing in Paris, from relatively obscure figures such as Charles Carrington, whose list included both The Picture of Dorian Gray and the pornographic novel Randiana, to bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, famous for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922.
A Publisher’s Paradise is a compelling exploration of the little-known history of foreign pornography in Paris and the central role it played in turning the city into a modernist outpost for literary and sexual vanguardism, a reputation that still lingers today in our cultural myths of midnight in Paris.
"With creative researching techniques, wit, and skill,
Colligan brings to life the little known, understudied world of booklegging and
book laundering, based in the French capital, but central to the development of
Anglo-American modernist writing at large. A Publisher’s Paradise makes
a significant scholarly contribution by taking ‘dirty books’ seriously and
showing their significance to larger political and cultural conflicts, and by
connecting dots that others have not connected."—Brooke Blower, author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic
Politics and Culture between the World Wars
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