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what do people think of the editing and even outright omission from modern editions of elements of the past that we now find problematic?
For example American Civil War themed Warner Bros. cartoons such as Southern Fried Rabbit and Enid Blyton books with corporal punishment?
I have no use for attempts at rewriting history by imposing my own values or standards upon the artistic expressions of others. I don't read or listen to music or look at art or watch films in order to reinforce my own values, standards, beliefs... and biases. It seems rather presumptuous to assume that our own culture represents some form of perfection worthy of imposing its values upon other cultures past or present.
Some of the bowdleriser's changes are just bizarre. There's no need to hide the fact that characters during WWII used pre-decimal currency, for example. And changing drinking tea to drinking Coke or re-naming a character from Betty to Paisley - the stupid just burns.
Heinous - the rewriting of history to fit modern-day preoccupations. Consummate nonsense, utter imbecility, complete ignorance.Quote:
Originally Posted by PADWCV
It's completely idiotic and the refuge of control freaks and morons.
Here's an example of how crass commercialism and self-righteous liberalism sought to censor a writer's work.
'In the United States, the novel was first published with the title The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, at the insistence by the publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company, that no one would buy or read a book with the word nigger in its title,[5] not because the word was deemed offensive but that a book about a black man would not sell.[7]
In 2009, WordBridge Publishing published a new edition titled The N-Word of the Narcissus, which also excised the word nigger from the text. According to the publisher, the point was to get rid of the offensive word, which may have led readers to avoid the book, and make it more accessible.[8] Though praised in some quarters, many others denounced the change as censorship.
Not sure that has anything to do with self-righteous liberalism, WordBridge Publishing is apparently the vanity press of a Dutch translator. One can assume all he did was do a Ctrl+F to change nigger to n-word of an open source text. It's literally just a guy with a printer in Amsterdam, hardly indicative of anything.
It's certainly indicative of censoring a writer's original text to the point where the book is rendered ridiculous. It is a matter of personal interpretation as to whether the translator or those who choose to access the source do so from self-righteousness or for some other reason.