Censorship is not only an instrument of control or suppression but also, Annabel Patterson has argued, a discipline to which we partly owe our concept of literature as a discourse with characteristics of its own. While supervising what could be said, and how, censorship could also stimulate ingenious strategies of circumvention, from clandestine presses and decoy imprints to elaborate literary techniques of irony and ellipsis. In important ways, the changing institutions and mechanisms of press regulation in Britain, from pre-publication licensing to libel prosecution and the spectacle of the pillory, may have energized literary production as much as they also constrained it. This is a familiar proposition for Renaissance England (also, in Robert Darnton's work, for Enlightenment France), and we begin with key episodes and texts from the press licensing era, which ended in 1695. At the heart of the course is the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era use of seditious libel prosecution to perform the work of censorship by alternative means, and we examine the implications for poetry, drama, satire, and the novel across the extended period. The course ends with the persistence of blasphemy and obscenity as (in Joss Marsh's term) "word crimes" in the early Victorian period.