The history of book banning reflects the history of social fear. From political dissidence to obscenity to excessive realism, the reasons for literary censorship tend to reflect a residing (or self-appointed) authority’s narrow analysis on behalf of everyone apparently incapable of passing judgment for themselves. Although some censoring rationales simply dissipate with time, other explanations for a book’s unfitting nature remain too absurd to ignore. To coincide with Banned Books Week 2010, here’s a sample of classic books that were censored for particularly ridiculous reasons.
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
Like most contentious fiction, Brave New World features a compelling cocktail of sex, drugs, and social satire. But, despite the book’s stunning originality, its objectors have been impressively (even hilariously) generic in their criticisms. It was banned in Ireland in 1932 for being, among other things, “anti-family” (because, you know, artificial sex hormones, sedatives, and porn are all the stuff of science fiction fantasy), and, as recently as 1993, parents unsuccessfully campaigned for it to be removed from a required reading list because it “centered around negative activity.”
Comments (8)
Wait, the governor of Hunan Province said that “animals should not use human language”? Did he also ban Journey to the West? Actually, knowing China, JttW probably *was* banned at some point…
[...] Last week we mentioned the novel Speak and the fact that it was a banned book. This week Banned Books Week is being celebrated by a number of bloggers, including The Story Siren, who challenges us all to read banned books this week! We also have the absurd logic behind some of the most famous banned books. [...]
This article should have been censored.
After I read this article I’m burning my computer.
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[...] The Absurd Logic Behind Some of the Most Famous Banned Books Tags: Banned Book Week This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. /* [...]
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