Word Crimes Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England
- List Price: $81.00
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
- Publish date: 07/01/1998
From extensive archival and literary research, Joss Marsh reconstructs a unified and particular account of blasphemy in Victorian England. Rewriting English history from the bottom up, she tells the forgotten stories of more than two hundred working-class "blasphemers", like Foote, whose stubborn refusal to silence their "hooligan" voices helped secure our rights to speak and write freely today. The new standards of criminality used to judge their "word crimes" rewrote the terms of literary judgment, demoting the Bible to literary masterpiece and raising Literature as the primary standard of Victorian cultural value.
Word Crimes is an essential study for anyone interested in nineteenth-century literature and culture or the history of censorship.
