Obscenity, Literary Censorship and Queer British Fiction : The Publishing Closet in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Establishing mid-20th-century queer fiction as both text and book object made up of crucial para-textual elements, this book explores the effect of post-Second World War politics and society on queer novels of the time and the circumstances surrounding their production, marketing and distribution.

In a largely intolerant climate, post-Second World War British publishers issued hundreds of works of fiction featuring queer characters or plotlines; but, against a backdrop of notions of discretion and laws prohibiting homosexuality, both the books and the texts were ‘toned down’. Exploring how these products were sites of containment and resistance, and representations of disrupted social, political, and economic conditions of the time, The Publishing Closet calls for us to re-examine and re-define our understandings off mid-century queer fiction and literary culture. With close readings, case studies and analysis of elements such as dust jackets alongside new evidence from the archives of publishing businesses, authors, literary agents, and editors, Christopher Adams covers works by Denton Welch, Francis King, Mary Renault, Martyn Goff and Gore Vidal and events including the accusations of censorship against the retailer W. H. Smith and the obscenity trial of Radcylffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Casting fresh light on queer literary history by mapping the confines of the ‘publishing closet’, this book demonstrates that in viewing queer fiction as book objects we might more fully understand them as products of constricting and competing social, legal, and economic forces that cohered around mid-century conceptions of the queer.