Book details
The Repeal of Reticence
America's Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art
Author: Rochelle Gurstein
The Repeal of Reticence
$29.00
About This Book
Book Details
At a time when America's faculties of taste and judgment—along with the sense of the sacred and shameful—have become utterly vacant, Rochelle Gurstein's The Repeal of Reticence delivers an important and troubling warning. Covering landmark developments in America's modern culture and law, she charts the demise of what was dismissively called "gentility" in the face of First Amendment triumphs for journalists, sex educators, and novelists—from Margaret Sanger's advocacy of birth control to Judge Woolsey's celebrated defense of Ulysses. Weaving together a study of the legal debates over obscenity and free speech with a cultural study of the critics and writers who framed the issues, Gurstein offers a trenchant reconsideration of the sacred value of privacy.
Imprint Publisher
Hill and Wang
ISBN
9780809016129
In The News
“The pollution of our moral environment has finally provoked a response comparable to Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's famous warning about the natural environment.” —Roger Shattuck, The Wall Street Journal