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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3078 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

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Maybe I'm too far out of the loop, but what are examples of CW books?

Flipping through my memories of childhood books, I'm getting

-- EDIT: Wow... A cursory search suggests 3/4 of these have been banned somewhere at some point in time (annotated below) so maybe I'm cruelly out of touch on this.

  • Where the Wild Things Are; hard to imagine anything controversial here -- banned in 1963 (immediately after publication) for promoting witchcraft and supernatural events

  • The Giving Tree; religious and secular interpretations and adoptions abound, nothing political -- banned in a public library in Colorado 1988 for sexism

  • The Little Prince; maybe vaguely cynical, reflecting de Saint-Exupéry's disenchantment at the time of writing

  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; a classic written over a century and a half ago, little to be controversial here, surely? -- banned in New Hampshire for allegories of sexual fantasies

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; a classic written over a century and a half ago, little to be controversial here, surely? -- banned in New Hampshire for allegories of sexual fantasies

I read this for the first time a couple years ago, and I'd describe it as more bizarre and surreal than anything else. I tried to think of what could have been allegorical of sexual fantasies in what I read, but I couldn't come up with any, and it does look like, if this link is correct, this had entirely to do with the author rather than the text itself:

In the early 1900s the state of New Hampshire banned the book from all public schools because the novel was accused of promoting sexual fantasies and masturbation. This accusation most likely refers to the questionable sexual activities of the author, not the novel’s content.

Everything old is new again, I suppose.

Perhaps not the text, nor the author, but the audience.

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