Loughborough University
Browse

File(s) under permanent embargo

Reason: This item is currently closed access.

Subversive middlebrow: The campaigns to ban Kathleen Winsor’sin the US and Canada

journal contribution
posted on 2016-03-11, 15:41 authored by Lise JaillantLise Jaillant
In 1944, Macmillan launched Kathleen Winsor’s racy first novel Forever Amber with an advertising budget of nearly $27,000. Forever Amber can be seen as an example of “the feminine middlebrow novel” (Humble), a kind of commercial fiction largely written and consumed by middle-class women. The immense success of both the novel and the $6,375,000 movie adaptation met with active resistance from conservative groups in the US and in Canada. In 1946, Winsor’s novel went on trial in Boston for obscenity. Moreover, the appeals to boycott movie theatres that played Forever Amber triggered similar campaigns in Canada. The Catholic press in Quebec endorsed the boycotts, and the Toronto politician David A. Balfour demanded a ban on “salacious literature.” Drawing on extensive archival research in the Macmillan collection at the New York Public Library and the Annie Laurie Williams papers at Columbia University Library, this article shows that a “middlebrow” bestseller such as Forever Amber played an important role in the fight against censorship in the US and in Canada. Yet the cultural impact of Forever Amber has been largely neglected, in part because scholars have focused on controversial “highbrow” fiction such as Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

History

School

  • The Arts, English and Drama

Department

  • English and Drama

Published in

International Journal of Canadian Studies

Volume

48

Pages

33 - 52

Citation

JAILLANT, L., 2014. Subversive middlebrow: The campaigns to ban Kathleen Winsor’sin the US and Canada. International Journal of Canadian Studies, 48, pp. 33-52.

Publisher

© University of Toronto Press

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This paper is in closed access.

ISSN

1180-3991

eISSN

1923-5291

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC