Outrages: sex, censorship, and the criminalization of love

I: A gentle angel. "In memoriam Arcadie" ; "A gentle angel enter'd" ; 1855 : Leaves of grass

II: 1857 : Outrages. Inventing the modern crime of obscenity ; The war against "filth" ; The invention of civil divorce, and of sodomy as a crime against the modern state

III: The state regulates desire. Formative scandals ; Calamus : "Paths untrodden" ; Symonds's second scandal ; "Goblin market" : attraction and aversion ; The state seizes the female body

IV: Love and literature driven underground. "I will go with him I love" ; Regina v. Hicklin : "to deprave and corrupt" ; Dangerous poems

V: The laboratory of empire. Six signs : "the anus and the state" ; Criminalizing "effeminacy" : the arrests of Fanny and Stella ; "My dear sir" ; Comstock : censorship crosses the Atlantic

VI: Counter-campaigns and resistance. The arrests of Simeon Solomon ; Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh ; "The Greek spirit" ; "Were I as free" : the secret sodomy poems

VII: The next generation : Symonds, Whitman and Wilde. "Love at first sight" ; Pilgrimage to Camden ; The Labouchere amendment : "gross indecency" ; Prophets of modernity ; "The life-long love of comrades" ; A problem in modern ethics

VIII: The memoirs. "As written by himself" ; "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses"

Afterword: Poetry as revolution.