"William Olmsted's study is an engaging, important and insightful contribution to scholarship on the 1857 obscenity trials connected to the publication of two landmarks of French literary modernism, Les Fleurs du Mal and Madame Bovary... It is that strong approach to integrating what are sometimes unnecessarily separate domains of literary studies that is one of Olmsted's chief contributions to the ongoing study of the moment of origin of Frenchliterary modernism." --Joseph Acquisto, H-"A savvy interpretation of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal, The Censorship Effect brings to light new insights on both authors' self-censorship in relation to prosecutors' literal readings. Learned and engaging, William Olmsted enriches our reading experience of works which have become deceptively familiar." --Edward K. Kaplan, author of Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in "The ParisianProwler""In 1857 occurred the trials for obscenity of both Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. The same prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, 'the great simplifier,' ran both trials. Hence William Olmsted's brilliant comparative study of how each author censored himself before and after his trial. Olmsted's naming of the 'pornogram,' i.e. a single then-unacceptable word, is both enlightening and delightful, and his new view of Flaubert'sfamous 'free indirect discourse' should change literary criticism for ever." --Annabel Patterson, author of The International Novel"Accessibly written and honestly argued, The Censorship Effect shows how censorship operates subtly at the level of creation as well as overtly at the level of reception; how some of the great literary devices, and even our modern 'liberated' ways of reading, have their origins in earlier writers' negotiation of a prevailing mentality of censorship. Olmsted suggests not only that creativity is never free of the censorship effect, but that a literalismin interpretation, ostensibly in the name of anti-censorship, precisely misses the point, even or especially in its effrontery." --Jonathan Dollimore, author of Sex, Literature and Censorship"A persuasive, highly readable, exploration of the ways in which censorship shaped modernism, both by restricting what writers felt they could say and by unwittingly inspiring forms of evasion. Through his perceptive readings of Baudelaire and Flaubert, Olmsted wittily demonstrates how writers, and in their wake, readers, lay bare the unspeakable while seeming to cover it up." --Rosemary Lloyd, author of Baudelaire's World"Rather than starting with the cliché standoff between freedom-loving author and repressive censor, Olmsted looks at the fascinating story of how Flaubert and Baudelaire anticipated and worked with censorship. Through meticulously researched demonstrations, he shows how Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal were shaped by their authors' 'waltzes' with the censor." --Elisabeth Ladenson, author of Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from MadamBovaryI to Lolita"Recommended."--Choice
