Publisher's description: "In [this book], Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and their authors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories have to tell us about the works themselves and about a changing cultural climate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them as masterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966); she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Written with a keen awareness of ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical acumen and delightful wit."--Dust jacket.

Preface :red hot chili peppers -- Prologue : history repeats itself -- Gustave Flaubert : Emma Bovary goes to Hollywood -- Charles Baudelaire : florist of evil -- James Joyce : Leopold Bloom's trip to the outhouse -- Radclyffe Hall : the well of prussic acid -- D. H. Lawrence : sexual intercourse begins -- Henry Miller : a gob of spit in the face of art -- Vladimir Nabokov : Lolitigation -- Epilogue : the return of the repressed.