Nicholas Harrison – författare

The French Revolution of 1789 bequeathed an enduring rhetoric of human rights which made it conventional to declare oneself against censorship and in favour of freedom of expression. But as this book demonstrates, the apparent consensus on this issue in modern France and elsewhere rests on a shaky sense of that rhetoric's history. And while censors have continued to the present day to charge clumsily across delicate moral and political fields, opponents of literary censorship, in particular, have frequently displayed excessive respect for censored material, mistakenly assuming that the censor can be relied upon to identify material that is disturbing, subversive, or true.Circles of Censorship focuses on key episodes in the history of literary censorship in France. It examines the Madame Bovary trial of 1857, and the prosecution a century later of Pauvert, publisher of Sade's complete works. It analyses and criticizes the Freudian-influenced attempts by the Surrealist movement and by Barthes and the Tel Quel group to subvert and evade censorship. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and approaches including history, literary theory and feminism, Nicholas Harrison presents a provocative and timely critique of the ideas on censorship which resurfaced repeatedly in the discourse of human rights, psychoanalysis and literary culture.

In the field of postcolonial studies, the full richness and complexity of the connections between literature, history and ideology are often overlooked by critics hurrying to stake out their political positions. As a result, many arguments are built on unjustified assumptions about the sort of work that literature — and criticism — can and cannot do. In this important and timely book, Harrison sheds new light on what is actually at issue in postcolonial criticism. Focusing on a series of major works, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Djebar’s autobiography, via Camus’s The Outsider and Fanon’s polemics, the book draws on and elucidates a wide range of theoretical and critical work. To students unfamiliar with postcolonial criticism it offers a way into the field via key issues and specific examples rather than abstract theoretical summary, while for those already working in the area it raises crucial questions about the very basis of postcolonial critical practice. Postcolonial Criticism is a major intervention in the field of postcolonial studies which re-examines critical suppositions about reading and representation, and which calls into question established notions about the relations between literature and colonialism.

In many thriving areas of critical activity, critics have come to view with suspicion such notions as literary specificity or literary autonomy, and perhaps even literature. Critics in fields such as postcolonial studies, queer theory and feminist theory have re-examined - and attacked - the groundings of a traditional literary canon, and have raised questions about the basis and benefits of literary study. These intellectual shifts have taken place in a political and institutional context where those studying and teaching literature have repeatedly come under pressure to justify their activities.Against this backdrop there has been a powerful resurgence of interest in the idea of the literary and in literature’s peculiar capacities. This collection features work by some of the most important and innovative thinkers and writers in the field, including a new poem by Assia Djebar. Together they force readers to reconsider the relations between the literary, the aesthetic, the ethical and the political, and demonstrate the reach and vitality of a renewed critical debate in which the literary is once more central to literary theory.Published as a special issue of the journal Paragraph (28:2)