Huckleberry Finn

[anotheoldgit]

http://tinyurl.com/36at68y

Should classical books now be censored because of their past wordage?

[naomi24]

No, they shouldn't. It's nonsense.

[LazyGun]

No. I dont really see how revisionism of books, films, or art to conform to modern cultural sensibilities is any different to rewriting historical events to satisfy some loony tune political extremism.Art of all forms provides a snapshot of the culture of the time and we shouldn't lose that by sanitising texts for the sake of the risk of causing offence to anyone.

[sp1814]

No - it should not be edited.

By editing this book to remove language deemed to be offensive, you deny today's children from learning about America's history both during and after the slave trade.

How can children learn about the origins of racism and oppression if you 'Tippex out' part of the past?

It's like obliterating the word 'slave' and replacing it with 'long-term obligated manual worker'.

[DTCwordfan]

Bring on Farenheit 451 - it might just come true.

[Whickerman]

of course this is a nonsense. On no account should books be censored, I even avoid abridged versions.

[rojash]

"This is not censorship. "
Well, JTP, in the strict sense you may be right, but if (as seems to be the case) a school withdraws the original from its libraries and curriculum, and replaces it with a bowdlerised version, that seems close enough to censorship to me.

[sp1814]

Hear heat birdie1971.

[jno]

for a while (I think they've changed it back), Swallows and Amazons was reprinted with Titty changed to Kitty.

Civilisation did not come to an end.

[eyethenkyew]

No amount of censoring will either stop certain people thinking the words or abusing them in private, will it? There is a big difference in those who deliberately set out to offend by the manner in which they express certain "taboo" words to those people who genuinely use them in their correct context.

Am I to feel woeful because shops used to stock (n!-%%-er) brown socks when I was a kid andmy dear old mother, who would have been mortified had she been classified as "racist", went shopping sometimes and would bring back such socks for me and my brothers? Did any of us use such terms in a so called racist connotation? Certainly not.

Am I also to wring my hands when remembering, when at school, we donated money for "the black babies" in Africa? No, we were contributing to impoverished nations - would it have made a difference had we referred to them as "Afro-Caribbean" babies? Of course it wouldn't.

[sandyRoe]

What about Conrad's The African-American of the Narcissus?

[jno]

why would there be Afro-Caribbean babies in Africa?

[jno]

somebody in the 18th century rewrote King Lear to give it a happy ending. It didn't last; the original is back with us now... or at least the closest to the original that we can get. It didn't prove to be the thin edge of any particular wedge. Despite the existence of abbreviated versions of Reach for the Sky and Swallows and Amazons and Huckleberry Finn, the originals have not been suppressed and thousands of unexpurgated books are still published every year. The world has bigger problems to deal with.

[jake-the-peg]

You're all such a bunch of purists.

I greatly enjoyed reading Kipling's just so stories to my Daughter when she was 5 or 6.

But I did have to mentally read ahead and skip over some his rather dodgy stuff.

So you'd deny me an edition that did this and insist my 5 year old understood the historical and social contex of Kipling's generation?

Get over yourselves!

And Rojash if a school decides not to place a particular edition on it's shelves that is censorship by the school.

I dare say they don't stock their shelves with the complete version of Lady Chatterly's lover or Nuts or Loaded either

[jno]

even if it had become standard, the original wouldn't have vanished. We don't live in a totalitarian society where books are burnt. Rewriting's not uncommon, particularly for kids

http://www.bournemout...n_for_new_generation/

but somewhere, somehow, the originals will always be around (the British Library and Library of Congress in the USA keep copies of everything published, for a start).