Expurgation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Censorship
Part of the series on

By Country
Algeria Australia Belarus Bhutan Burma Canada China Cuba East Germany France Germany India Indonesia Iran Ireland Israel Japan	Malaysia Pakistan Portugal Russia Samoa Saudi Arabia Singapore South Asia North Korea Soviet Union Sweden Taiwan Thailand Tunisia Turkey United Kingdom United States
See also: Freedom of speech by country
By media
Advertisements Anime Books Films	Re-edited films Internet Music Video games
By channel
BBC	MTV
By method
Book burning Bleep censor Broadcast delay Content-control software Expurgation Pixelization Postal censorship Prior restraint Self-censorship Whitewashing Gag order
By context
Corporate censorship Under fascist regimes Political censorship In religion This box: view • talk • edit

Expurgation is a form of censorship by way of purging anything noxious, offensive, sinful, or erroneous, usually from an artistic work. In recent times, this has been known as bowdlerization after Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work that he considered to be more appropriate than the original for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

[edit] Examples

In 1264, Clement IV ordered that the Jews of Aragon to submit their books to Dominican censors for expurgation.^[1]
The Private Memoirs of Kenelm Digby (1603 – 1665) were finally published in 1828 in a bowdlerized form.
Fanny Hill (1748) was self-censored by author John Cleland in a 1750 edition. A modern edition was banned until Memoirs v. Massachusetts overturned the ban.
Justine (aka The Misfortunes of Virtue) (1791) was not completely translated to English until 1953 by Austryn Wainhouse.
Several themes in the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were toned down in the 1958 film of the same name, resulting in the playwright Tennessee Williams advising people to not view the film.
In 1986, to mark the centenary of Lofting's birth, new editions of Doctor Dolittle were published with passages rewritten or removed to avoid usage of derogatory terms for and depiction of certain ethnic groups therein, both written and illustrated.