SOURCE: Pagnattaro, Marisa Anne. “Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard and Ulysses.” Twentieth-Century Literature 47, no. 2 (summer 2001): 217-40.

In the following essay, Pagnattaro discusses the legal definitions of obscenity confronted by James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses when its publication was challenged by U.S. courts.

What did I tell you? raged Quinn. You're damned fools trying to get away with such a thing as “Ulysses” in this puritan-ridden country. … I don't think that anything can be done. I'll fight for you, but it's a lost cause. You're idiots, both of you. … You haven't an ounce of sense.

—Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years' War (215)

As it turns out, great patron of the arts and prima donna lawyer John Quinn was right. Well, partly right. In 1921, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were convicted of publishing “indecent matter”¹ in The Little Review—the concluding part of “Nausicaa,” the thirteenth episode of Ulysses...