The BBC has a fantastic article on the rewriting of books / texts / history to come in line with the (trendy?) woke currency of today. Check it out – GOOGLE: Roald Dahl: The fierce debate over rewriting children’s classics / Neil Armstrong / BBC / May 30, 2023
Of note:
Rushdie described the changes [i.e. to the edits on Dahl’s words] as “absurd censorship”. A spokesman for the prime minister said: “It is important that works of literature, works of fiction, are preserved and not airbrushed.”
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In the New York Times, Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free speech charity, PEN America, was quoted as saying: “You want to think about the precedent that you’re setting, and what would happen if someone of a different predisposition or ideology were to pick up the pen and start crossing things out.”
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Although Dahl’s reputation is not what it once was … the broad consensus seemed to be that this was the first step on the path to a literary wasteland of bland, boring identikit texts.
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If every text were stripped of every single thing that someone might conceivably be offended by, there wouldn’t be much left
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Certainly writers do seem to be cautious about putting their head above the parapet. BBC Culture contacted five prominent children’s authors to ask if they wished to comment on this issue. Four did not want to contribute, one did not respond.
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The Bookseller has described “sensitivity readers” as “readers from specific backgrounds, or those with particular life experiences reading manuscripts to help eliminate problematic and harmful representations”
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And, of course, the very word “bowdlerisation”, bandied around so much recently, originated with over-zealous 19th Century sensitivity reader Thomas Bowdler rewriting Shakespeare to remove, among other things, sexual innuendo. If the Bard can be rewritten, so can anyone.
