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The Family Shakespeare,Thomas Bowdler's famous reworked edition ofWilliam Shakespeare's plays. 1818

Anexpurgationof a work, also known as abowdlerization,fig-leaf editionorcensorship by political correctnessis a form ofcensorshipthat involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work or other type of writing or media.[1][2][3][4]

The termbowdlerizationis often used in the context of the expurgation oflewdmaterial from books.[5]The term derives fromThomas Bowdler's 1818 edition ofWilliam Shakespeare's plays, which he reworked in ways that he felt were more suitable for women and children.[6]He similarly editedEdward Gibbon'sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire.[7]A less common term used in this context, also based on common editorial practice, isAd usum Delphini;referring to a series of consciously censored classical works.[8][9]

Afig-leaf editionis a more satirical term for a bowdlerized text, deriving from the practice of covering the genitals of nudes in classical and Renaissance statues and paintings withfig leaves.

Another term used in related discourse is censorship bypolitical correctness.[10]

When this practice is adopted voluntarily, by publishers of new editions or translators, it is seen as a form ofself-censorship.[3][11]

Texts subject to expurgation arederivative works,sometimes subject to renewed copyright protection.[12]

Examples

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See also:Category:Works subject to expurgation

Religious

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Sexual

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  • Due to its mockery of the ancestors of the modernBritish Royal Family,[16]graphic descriptions of sex acts, and the symptoms ofvenereal disease,[17]Scottish Gaelicnational poetAlasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair's groundbreaking1751poetry bookAis-eridh na Sean Chánoin Albannaich( "The Resurrection of the Old Scottish Language" ) continued to be republished only in heavily bowdlerized editions by puritanical censors throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.[18]The first uncensored text was published only in 2020.[19]
  • "The Crabfish"(known also as" The Sea Crabb "), an English folk song dating back to the mid-1800s about a man who places a crab into achamber pot,unbeknownst to his wife, who later uses the pot without looking, and is attacked by the crab.[20]Over the years, sanitized versions of the song were released in which a lobster or crab grabs the wife by the nose[21]instead of by the genitals,[20]and others in which each potentially offensive word is replaced with an inoffensive word that does not fit the rhyme scheme, thus implying that there is a correct word that does rhyme. For instance, "Children, children, bring the looking glass / Come and see the crayfish that bit your mother's a-face" (ass).[22]
  • The 1925Harvard Pressedition ofMontaigne's essays(translated byGeorge Burnham Ives) omitted the essays that pertain to sex.[23]
  • ABoston-area banonUpton Sinclair's novelOil!– owing to a short motel sex scene – prompted the author to assemble a 150-copy fig-leaf edition with the nine offending pages blacked out as a publicity stunt.[24][25]
  • In 1938, a jazz song "Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy)"peaked at number two on US charts. The original lyrics were sung with the word" floozie ", meaning a sexually promiscuous woman, or a prostitute, but record companyVocalionobjected. Hence the word was substituted with the almost similar sounding title word "floogie" in the second recording. The "floy floy" in the title was a slang term for a venereal disease, but that was not widely known at the time. In the lyrics it is sung repeatedly "floy-doy", which was widely thought as a nonsense refrain. Since the lyrics were regarded as nonsense the song failed to catch the attention of censors.
  • In 1920, an American publisher bowdlerized the George Ergerton translation ofKnut Hamsun'sHunger.[26]
  • Lady Chatterley's Loverby English authorD. H. Lawrence.An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960.
  • Several music artists have changed song titles to appease radio stations. For example, an expurgated remix of Snoop Dogg's song "Wet"was released under the title" Sweat "andRihanna's song "S&M"had to be changed to" C'mon "in the UK.[27]

Racial

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  • Recent editions of many works—includingMark Twain'sHuckleberry Finn[28]andJoseph Conrad'sNigger of theNarcissus—have found various replacements ( "slave", "Indian", "soldier boy", "N-word", "children" ) for the wordnigger.An example of bowdlerization can be plainly seen inHuckleberry Finn,in which Twain used racial slurs in natural speech to highlight what he saw as racism and prejudice endemic to theAntebellum South.[29][30]
  • Agatha Christie'sTen Little Niggerswas dramatised by the BBC under the nameAnd Then There Were None.It was subsequently re-released under this title in the United States, and the short poem which is intrinsic to the plot was changed fromTen Little NiggerstoTen Little Indians.[31][32]
  • The American version of the counting rhyme "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe",which was changed by some to add the word" nigger ",[33]is now sung with a different word, such as "tiger".
  • The Hardy Boyschildren's mystery novels (published starting in 1927) contained heavy doses of racism. They were extensively revised starting in 1959 in response to parents' complaints about racial stereotypes in the books.[34]For further information, seeThe Hardy Boys#1959–1979.
  • The Story of Doctor Dolittleand relevant works have been reedited to remove controversial references to and plots related to non-white characters (in particular, African ones).[35][36]

Cursing

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  • Many Internet message boards and forums use automaticwordfilteringto block offensive words and phrases from being published or automatically amend them to more innocuous substitutes such asasterisksor nonsense. This often catches innocent words, in a scenario referred to as theScunthorpe problem;words such as 'assassinate' and 'classic' may become 'buttbuttinate' or 'clbuttic'. Users frequently self-bowdlerize their own writing by using slight misspellings or variants, such as 'fcuk' or 'pron'.[37][38]
  • The 2010 song"Fuck You"byCeeLo Green,which made the top-10 in thirteen countries, was also broadcast as "Forget You", with a matching music video, where the changed lyrics cannot be lip-read, as insisted on by the record company.[39]

Other

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  • A student edition of the novelFahrenheit 451wasexpurgatedto remove a variety of content. This was ironic given the subject matter of the novel involvesburning books.This continued for a dozen years before it was brought to authorRay Bradbury's attention and he convinced the publisher to reinstate the material.[40][41][42][43]
  • The video gameSouth Park: The Fractured but Wholewas originally going to have the nameThe Butthole of Time.However, marketers would not promote anything with a vulgarity in its title, so "butthole" was replaced with the homophone "but whole".[44][45]
  • In 2023 new versions ofRoald Dahl's books were published byPuffin Booksto remove language deemed inappropriate. Puffin had hiredsensitivity readersto go over his texts to make sure the books could "continue to be enjoyed by all today".[46]The same was done with theJames Bondnovels.[47]

See also

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References

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  1. ^Salvador, Roberto (13 June 2023)."Censorship and Expurgation of the Selected Children's Literature".The Quest: Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development.2(1).doi:10.60008/thequest.v2i1.57.ISSN1908-3211.
  2. ^Sturm, Michael O. (1983)."Censorship: Where Do We Stand?".American Secondary Education.12(3): 5–8.ISSN0003-1003.JSTOR41063608.
  3. ^abMerkle, Denise (2001). "When expurgation constitutes ineffective censorship: the case of three Vizetelly translations of Zola". In Thelen, Marcel (ed.).Translation and meaning. 5: Proceedings of the Maastricht session of the 3rd International Maastricht-Łódz Duo Colloquium on "Translation and Meaning", held in Maastricht, The Netherlands, 26 - 29 April 2000 / Marcel Thelen.. ed(PDF).Maastricht: Euroterm.ISBN978-90-801039-4-8.
  4. ^"Expurgation of Library Resources: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights | ALA".www.ala.org.Retrieved21 August2024.
  5. ^Goldstein, Kenneth S. (1967)."Bowdlerization and Expurgation: Academic and Folk".The Journal of American Folklore.80(318): 374–386.doi:10.2307/537416.ISSN0021-8715.JSTOR537416.
  6. ^Wheeler, Kip."Censorship and Bowdlerization"(PDF).Jefferson City, Tennessee, USA:Carson-Newman University.p. 1. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 21 March 2012.Retrieved22 February2023.
  7. ^Gibbon, Edward (1826).Gibbon's History of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, repr. with the omission of all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency, by T. Bowdler.pp. i, iii.
  8. ^Hollewand, Karen E. (11 March 2019),"Scholarship",The Banishment of Beverland,Brill, pp. 109–168,ISBN978-90-04-39632-6,retrieved21 August2024
  9. ^Harrison, Stephen; Pelling, Christopher, eds. (2021).Classical Scholarship and Its History.doi:10.1515/9783110719215.ISBN978-3-11-071921-5.Retrieved21 August2024.{{cite book}}:|website=ignored (help)
  10. ^Essi, Cedric (December 2018)."Queer Genealogies across the Color Line and into Children's Literature: Autobiographical Picture Books, Interraciality, and Gay Family Formation".Genealogy.2(4): 43.doi:10.3390/genealogy2040043.ISSN2313-5778.
  11. ^Woods, Michelle (2019). "Censorship". In Washbourne, R. Kelly; Van Wyke, Benjamin (eds.).The Routledge handbook of literary translation.Routledge handbooks in translation and interpreting studies. London New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 511–523.doi:10.4324/9781315517131-34.ISBN978-1-315-51713-1.
  12. ^Smith, Cathay Y. N. (12 January 2024)."Editing Classic Books: A Threat to the Public Domain? - Virginia Law Review".virginialawreview.org.Retrieved21 August2024.
  13. ^Popper, William (May 1889).The Censorship of Hebrew Books(1st ed.). New Rochelle, New York, USA: Knickerbocker Press. pp. 13–14.OCLC70322240.OL23428412M.
  14. ^Greenfield, Jeanette (26 January 1996).The Return of Cultural Treasures.England:Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-47746-8.
  15. ^Carus, Paul (1925).The Open Court.Open Court Publishing Company.
  16. ^Charles MacDonald (2011),Moidart: Among the Clanranalds,Birlinn Limited.pp. 129-130.
  17. ^Derek S. Thomson (1983),The Companion to Gaelic Scotland,page 185.
  18. ^The Scottish Poetry Library interviews Alan Riach about Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair,June 2016.
  19. ^Aiseirigh: Òrain le Alastair Mac Mhaighstir Alastair,The Gaelic Books Council.
  20. ^abFrederick J. Furnivall, ed. (1867).Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript: loose and humorous songs.London. p. 100.{{cite book}}:CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  21. ^Feierabend, John M. (1 April 2004).The Crabfish.Illustrated by Vincent Ngyen. Gia Publications.ISBN9781579993832.OCLC59550589.
  22. ^"The Crayfish".Archivedfrom the original on 9 April 2022.Retrieved22 February2022.
  23. ^Bussacco, Michael C. (2009).Heritage Press Sandglass Companion Book: 1960–1983.Tribute Books (Archibald, Penn.). p. 252.ISBN9780982256510.Retrieved23 September2010.
  24. ^Curtis, Jack (17 February 2008)."Blood from Oil".The Boston Globe.Boston, Massachusetts, USA.ISSN0743-1791.OCLC66652431.Archivedfrom the original on 11 July 2016.Retrieved23 September2010.
  25. ^Sinclair, Mary Craig(1957).Southern Belle.New York: Crown Publishers. p. 309.ISBN9781578061525.Retrieved23 September2010.
  26. ^Lyngstad, Sverre (2005).Knut Hamsun, Novelist: A Critical Assessment.Peter Lang.ISBN978-0-8204-7433-5.
  27. ^"When Artists Are Forced to Change Song Titles".BET.Retrieved21 October2023.
  28. ^Tomasky, Michael (7 January 2011)."The NewHuck Finn".The Guardian.London, England.ISSN1756-3224.OCLC60623878.Archivedfrom the original on 21 September 2013.Retrieved6 September2013.
  29. ^Lowenthal, David (October 2015).The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited.Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-85142-8.
  30. ^Fulton, Joe B. (1997).Mark Twain's Ethical Realism: The Aesthetics of Race, Class, and Gender.University of Missouri Press.ISBN978-0-8262-1144-6.
  31. ^Bunson, Matthew (2000).The Complete Christie: An Agatha Christie Encyclopedia.Simon and Schuster.ISBN978-0-671-02831-2.
  32. ^Marshall, Elizabeth; Sensoy, Özlem (2011).Rethinking Popular Culture and Media.Rethinking Schools.ISBN978-0-942961-48-5.
  33. ^Opie, Iona; Opie, Peter.The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes(2nd ed.). England:Oxford University Press.pp. 156–8.ISBN0198600887.OL432879M.Retrieved22 February2023.
  34. ^Rehak, Melanie (2005).Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her(1st ed.). Harcourt, Orlando, Florida, USA: Harvest (published 2006). p. 243.ISBN9780156030564.OCLC769190422.OL29573540M.Retrieved22 February2023.
  35. ^Lanes, Selma G. "Doctor Dolittle, Innocent Again",New York Times.August 28, 1988.
  36. ^Smith, Cathay Y. N. (12 January 2024)."Editing Classic Books: A Threat to the Public Domain? - Virginia Law Review".virginialawreview.org.Retrieved21 August2024.
  37. ^Pourciau, Lester J. (1999).Ethics and Electronic Information in the Twenty-first Century.Purdue University Press.ISBN978-1-55753-138-4.
  38. ^Ng, Jason (27 August 2013).Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on ChinaÕs Version of Twitter (And Why).New Press, The.ISBN978-1-59558-871-5.
  39. ^Smith, Caspar Llewellyn (14 November 2010)."Cee Lo Green: 'I've been such an oddball my whole life' | Q&A".The Guardian.ISSN0261-3077.Retrieved10 October2020.
  40. ^Crider, Bill (Fall 1980). Lee, Billy C.; Laughlin, Charlotte (eds.)."Reprints/Reprints:Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451".Paperback Quarterly.III(3): 25.ISBN9781434406330.Archivedfrom the original on 4 May 2021.Retrieved11 November2020.The censorship began with a special 'Bal-Hi' edition in 1967, an edition designed for high school students...
  41. ^Karolides, Nicholas J.; Bald, Margaret; Sova, Dawn B. (2011).120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature(Second ed.). Checkmark Books. p. 488.ISBN978-0-8160-8232-2.In 1967, Ballantine Books published a special edition of the novel to be sold in high schools. Over 75 passages were modified to eliminate such words ashell,damn,andabortion,and two incidents were eliminated. The original first incident described a drunk man who was changed to a sick man in the expurgated edition. In the second incident, reference is made to cleaningfluffout of the humannavel,but the expurgated edition changed the reference to cleaning ears.
  42. ^Greene, Bill (February 2007)."The mutilation and rebirth of a classic: Fahrenheit 451".Compass: New Directions at Falvey.III(3). Villanova University.Archivedfrom the original on 11 February 2021.Retrieved3 August2013.
  43. ^Karolides, Nicholas J.; Bald, Margaret; Sova, Dawn B. (2011).120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature(Second ed.). Checkmark Books. p. 488.ISBN978-0-8160-8232-2.After six years of simultaneous editions, the publisher ceased publication of the adult version, leaving only the expurgated version for sale from 1973 through 1979, during which neither Bradbury nor anyone else suspected the truth.
  44. ^"South Park: The Fractured But Whole was originally called South Park: The Butthole of Time".VideoGamer.com.25 July 2016.Retrieved25 December2021.
  45. ^"'South Park: The Fractured But Whole' game – everything you need to know ".NME.25 September 2017.Retrieved25 December2021.
  46. ^Rawlinson, Kevin; Banfield-Nwachi, Mabel; Shaffi, Sarah (20 February 2023)."Rishi Sunak joins criticism of changes to Roald Dahl books".The Guardian.London, England.ISSN1756-3224.OCLC60623878.Archivedfrom the original on 21 February 2023.Retrieved22 February2022.
  47. ^Haring, Bruce (26 February 2023)."James Bond Books Edited To Avoid Offense To Modern Audiences – Report".Deadline.USA:Penske Media Corporation.Archivedfrom the original on 28 February 2023.Retrieved26 February2023.
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