With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship Shaped literary expression in distinctive ways.
By rooting censorship in the particulars of history, Darnton\'s revealing study enables us to think more clearly about efforts to control expression past and present..
A system so pervasive that it lodged inside the authors\' heads as self-censorship, it left visible scars in the nation\'s literature.
Behind the unmarked office doors of Ninety Clara-Zetkin Street in East Berlin, Censors developed annual plans for Literature in negotiation with high party officials and prominent writers.
In Communist East Germany, censorship was a component of the party program to engineer society.
Their efforts to meld imperial power and liberal principle fed a growing Indian opposition.
Seeking to suppress Indian publications that it deemed seditious, the British held hearings in which literary criticism led to prison sentences.
Years later the outrage stirred by the British partition of Bengal led the Raj to put this knowledge to use.
Shaken by the Sepoy uprising in 1857, the British Raj undertook a vast surveillance of every aspect of Indian life, including its literary output.
Relationships at court trumped principle in the Old Regime.
Even as the king\'s Censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself incubated Diderot\'s great Encyclopedie by hiding the banned project\'s papers in his Paris townhouse.
In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making Literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege.
With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship Shaped literary expression in distinctive ways
