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Salient. An organ of student opinion at Victoria University, Wellington. Vol. 23. No. 7. Monday, August 8, 1960.

Stevens' talks to Society

Stevens' talks to Society

"Morals are the very stuff of art," quote Prof. J. Stevens from Havelock Eilis's book on banned literature at a talk held recently by the Literary Society. Yet for "excellent reasons," society has seen fit to ban certain book as dangerous to the public. Why has this been so? prof. Stevens holds that it is because the artist is generally ahead of his community la his ideas and his way of expressing them. Society, always more conservative in the mass than in the individual, therefore suppresses this literature because it holds it as dangerous to the status quo. Medieval society, through the Church or the Government, suppressed heresy; in the Renaissance, books were banned on political content as "subversive." Today, In fact for the last 200 years, the banning has been on sex and violence, that is to say, in the non-Communist countries, and censorship in the U.S.A. has been particularly suppressive. It has been noticeable that increase of censorship is proportionate with the growth of a reading public.