The Age of Obscenity: Sex, Speech and Censorship in the Long 19th Century Straddling the line between art and non‐art, protected speech and prohibited conduct, moral pollution and expressive liberty, the obscene is notoriously difficult to define coherently. Yet at the present moment, when the concept of free expression and the critique of censorship have largely been coopted by reactionary politics and deployed as ideological bludgeons, it has become more urgent than ever to confront that definitional difficulty, and to reexamine the modern formation of the obscenity concept in the context of the 19th and early 20th century literary works which first put it to the test as a legal, moral, sexual, and aesthetic category, among them: Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure; Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Henry Vizetelly's English translation of Zola's La Terre; D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover; Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs de Mal; Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and Ballades; and Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights. Additionally, we will read in legal history as well as the archive of parliamentary and court transcripts, in order to become conversant with the development of modern obscenity law. At the same time, our investigation will engage with more recent accounts of the obscene within cultural, legal and especially feminist theory, such as Catharine MacKinnon's polemical anti‐pornographic writings, Bruno Latour's writings on iconoclasm, and Foucault's work in the history of sexuality. (18th/19th)