Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0544274024 ISBN 13: 9780544274020

Synopsis

The best-selling author of , Give Me Liberty, and The End of America illuminates a dramatic buried story of*history—how a single English law in 1857 led to a maelstrom, with reverberations lasting down to our day Until 1857, the State did not link the idea of &ldquo*rdquo; to deviancy. In the same year, the concept of the “obscene” was coined. New York Times best-selling author Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is the story, brilliantly told, of why this two-pronged State repression took hold—first in England and spreading quickly to America—and why it was attached so dramatically, for the first time, to*men.   Before 1857 it wasn’t &ldquo*rdquo; that was a crime, but simply the act of* But in a single stroke, not only was love between men illegal, but anything referring to this love became obscene, unprintable, unspeakable. Wolf paints the dramatic ways this played out among a bohemian group of*dissidents, including Walt Whitman in America and the closeted*English critic John Addington Symonds—in love with Whitman’s*voice in Leaves of Grass—as, decades before the infamous 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, dire prison terms became the State’s penalty for *  Most powerfully, Wolf recounts how a dying Symonds helped write the book on &ldquo*inversion” that created our modern understanding of * And she convinces that his secret memoir, mined here fully for the first time, stands as the first*rights manifesto in the west.

About this edition

• ISBN 10: 0544274024
• ISBN 13: 9780544274020
• Binding: Hardcover