Matthew Fellion
Autor von Censored: A Literary History of Subversion and Control
Werke von Matthew Fellion
Getagged
Wissenswertes
Für diesen Autor liegen noch keine Einträge mit "Wissenswertem" vor. Sie können helfen.
Mitglieder
Rezensionen
Using selected examples, the authors trace the history of censorship, mostly in Britain and the United States. Because much of the law being applied in each country is the same from case to case, there is some unavoidable repetition of the intent of each law, its application, its impact, and (usually) how it was eventually taken off the books or invalidated in court. There are interesting distinctions drawn between British and American laws, with America’s laws being a bit less draconian. The examples of works being censored are varied, ranging from works whose primary purpose seems to have been to titillate or push against boundaries, such as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill, to more substantial works with erotic elements, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Ulysses, to works that offend different people in different ways at different times, such as Huckleberry Finn. The authors also discuss an instance of largely self-censorship concerning the 18th century British author Frances Burney, several of whose works were not published in her lifetime because her father and other males did not approve of them. While she almost certainly could have defied their wishes on account of her considerable success as an author, she nevertheless acquiesced.
The causes for censorship are the usual ones, which are often tangled together inextricably, such as religion and the intolerance of homosexuality. The earliest example in the book is the banning of several early English translations of the Bible, not for any textual errors, but because they threatened the exclusive power of the church and clergy to interpret the Latin Bible for their own purposes. Later, books were banned or proscribed for questioning religion or offending religious sensibilities. Other books were banned, ostensibly, to keep them from impressing themselves on school children or the feeble-minded.
The most egregious example of censorship took place in Arizona, where the Republican legislature shut down an entire Hispanic Studies program on the basis that it promoted anti-Americanism and ethnic solidarity. Faced with the new state law, school officials in Tucson had to shut down the program and remove several books from the library. At the time this book was published, the final trial in a lawsuit filed by students was about to take place. I’m happy to report that, post publication, a judge struck down the entire law, in a complete vindication for the school system and its students.
The trend throughout the book is for censorship and restrictions to fall by the wayside as the decades go by. It is hard to imagine authors being jailed, as was Oscar Wilde, or publishers going to jail or seeing their stocks of books burned, as happened on multiple occasions. But the authors do prove a modern example, Paladin Press, where some restrictions may be legal. Paladin published books such as a guide to becoming a successful hit man, discussed in this book, as well as books about making bombs and poisons that were judged to be direct incitements to commit criminal acts, and were therefore not protected as free speech the way a murder mystery, horror novel, or slasher film would be.
The authors also briefly discuss internet censorship at the end of the book, such as required filters on library computers or, in Britain, internet service providers being able to restrict whole lists of websites. While these restrictions seem more intended to protect children from things they may not be prepared for, it does show that the battle against censorship is never finished—nor will the issued involved be black and white.
Readers may question why some works are included, while others are not, but the authors’ choices seem reasonable and provide a nice variety of nuances in censorship. Also, the book is long enough already. The book’s focus on the United States and Britain also restricts its scope, but discussions of the types of extreme censorship that go on in places such as China deserve their own volume. We get a taste of how bad it can get in the book’s discussion of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
Throughout, the authors take what could be a dry subject and keep it interesting through excellent writing. While the book might have benefitted from a strictly chronological arrangement, rather than its work-by-work approach, which would have reduced repetition, the chosen arrangement does make it much easier to read just about the work that concerns you. Each chapter can pretty much stand alone. All in all, this is very well done, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves books.… (mehr)
The causes for censorship are the usual ones, which are often tangled together inextricably, such as religion and the intolerance of homosexuality. The earliest example in the book is the banning of several early English translations of the Bible, not for any textual errors, but because they threatened the exclusive power of the church and clergy to interpret the Latin Bible for their own purposes. Later, books were banned or proscribed for questioning religion or offending religious sensibilities. Other books were banned, ostensibly, to keep them from impressing themselves on school children or the feeble-minded.
The most egregious example of censorship took place in Arizona, where the Republican legislature shut down an entire Hispanic Studies program on the basis that it promoted anti-Americanism and ethnic solidarity. Faced with the new state law, school officials in Tucson had to shut down the program and remove several books from the library. At the time this book was published, the final trial in a lawsuit filed by students was about to take place. I’m happy to report that, post publication, a judge struck down the entire law, in a complete vindication for the school system and its students.
The trend throughout the book is for censorship and restrictions to fall by the wayside as the decades go by. It is hard to imagine authors being jailed, as was Oscar Wilde, or publishers going to jail or seeing their stocks of books burned, as happened on multiple occasions. But the authors do prove a modern example, Paladin Press, where some restrictions may be legal. Paladin published books such as a guide to becoming a successful hit man, discussed in this book, as well as books about making bombs and poisons that were judged to be direct incitements to commit criminal acts, and were therefore not protected as free speech the way a murder mystery, horror novel, or slasher film would be.
The authors also briefly discuss internet censorship at the end of the book, such as required filters on library computers or, in Britain, internet service providers being able to restrict whole lists of websites. While these restrictions seem more intended to protect children from things they may not be prepared for, it does show that the battle against censorship is never finished—nor will the issued involved be black and white.
Readers may question why some works are included, while others are not, but the authors’ choices seem reasonable and provide a nice variety of nuances in censorship. Also, the book is long enough already. The book’s focus on the United States and Britain also restricts its scope, but discussions of the types of extreme censorship that go on in places such as China deserve their own volume. We get a taste of how bad it can get in the book’s discussion of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
Throughout, the authors take what could be a dry subject and keep it interesting through excellent writing. While the book might have benefitted from a strictly chronological arrangement, rather than its work-by-work approach, which would have reduced repetition, the chosen arrangement does make it much easier to read just about the work that concerns you. Each chapter can pretty much stand alone. All in all, this is very well done, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves books.… (mehr)
Statistikseite
- Werke
- 1
- Mitglieder
- 30
- Beliebtheit
- #449,942
- Bewertung
- 4.5
- Rezensionen
- 2
- ISBNs
- 4
From the introduction:
From the dawn of Milton's "Aeropagitica" which was published in 1644 in an attempt to persuade Parliament to reject censorship, to Amazon (accidentally, over trademark issues) deleting George Orwell books from their online shop, the book picks up on different ways that governments, individuals, religious groups, kings, artists, and even creators themselves have tried to restrict access to material in a variety of ways, and problematises this throughout in very interesting ways, mainly morally and philosophically.
The problematic ways that one can see censorship are highlighted:
As Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Queen Mab" opened a Pandora's Box of potential issues for book vendors and publishers, the success of that book led to over twenty-six pirated editions of his poetry being flogged. This is known as the Streisand effect:
This is not entirely uncommon, as this book shows; over centuries, many different kinds of censored literature has not only been pirated and smuggled, but also rewritten to make the new versions legally sound, at least for a moment. This is not unlike how drugs are today changed on the molecular level to make them legal.
There are many instances, from Émile Zola to Oscar Wilde, where authors even evaded their home country, but also when their publishers were attacked; in Wilde's case, the popular franchise W.H. Smith stopped selling his writings entirely, and theaters vacated his plays.
This book is great at explaining how censorship has snaked its way to what it is today, in different places. Different tests of morality have been devised, on different media: the written word has been treated differently than comics, but the effects are always similar.
When the Australian magazine "OZ" was prosecuted for obscenity in the 1960s and 1970s, the effects were at times inadvertedly and simultaneously hilarious and frightening:
Prisons censor what prisoners are allowed to read, Christian western countries censor Muslim literature (while Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" led to ayatollah Khomeini of Iran request the death of Rushdie, moral-panic persons such as Mary Whitehouse made homosexuality out to be The Devil in the UK during the 1980s... It's all very well written.
The book also contains a small part on how corporations censor:
All in all, this is a highly recommendable book, which opened my eyes to censorship, what it has actually been and how it appears today.… (mehr)