October 30, 2015, by Sunita Tailor
Banned Books Week
This blog post was written by final year American Studies and English student, Radhika Chond from the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies.
The last week of September/early October has recently been recognised as Banned Books week and so avid readers took the chance to celebrate the fREADom to read by sinking into one of these forbidden reads.
As Oscar Wilde stated: ‘The Books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame’.
Treat with caution; all these texts were censored on various explicit grounds…
How many can you tick off?
1) George Orwell’s 1984:
Reasons: espionage, sexually explicit, political unrest, alluded to actual propaganda and communism events happening during the 80s!
2) J.D Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye:
Reasons: racial grounds, excessively vulgar language, sexual scenes and general immorality
3) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
Reasons: adultery, explicit sexual references, immorality and violence
4) Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange:
Reasons: overt immorality, glorifies rape and violence, addiction to substances and lies, extreme punishments
5) Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner:
(And Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird)
Reasons: vulgar language, references to violence and rape and derogatory racist language
6) Allen Ginsberg’s Howl:
Reasons: raw imagery, openly sexual content, promoted cultural revolution, subject of one of the largest obscenity trials in American Literature.
7) D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
Reasons: (not one to be treated lightly, it was banned for more than 30 years) overtly sexual references, adultery, vulgar language, general depravity.
8) Kate Chopin’s The Awakening:
Reasons: scandalous thoughts, social implications for women, explicit sexual tones, independent females.
9) Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:
Reasons: insight into the mind of a paedophile, for being overtly violent, obscene and derogatory.
10) The Harry Potter series!
(Who would have thought??)
Reasons: Banned in Maine, USA in 2001 by a group of parents who staged a book-burning to torch the series which they believed was promoting violence, witchcraft, the supernatural and devil worship…
[Featured images from:
http://lifeonthebluehighways.com/files/2014/10/Btr-Gatsby-Cover.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51M3Kl80Z%2BL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg]
No comments yet, fill out a comment to be the first
Leave a Reply