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

Pregnant Prose

Pregnant Prose

Prof. Stevens then launched Into a highly entertaining list of banned publications. In 367 B.C., Plato tried to expurgate Homer; Ovid has been banned time and time again throughout the Middle Ages. Luther had his German translation of the Bible burnt in 1634 (even today in Russia, the Bible and Koran are only kept in enormous reference libraries: this of course limits their readers—an effective form of censorship). The Decameron has been burnt, expurgated, and hewed about many times, and is still today in some countries. In New Zealand, before World War II, a bookseller was prosecuted for selling the book, but subsequently acquitted with the warning not to place an Illustrated edition in the window. Other authors banned were Machiavelll, Rabelais, Galileo, Shakespeare, Mollere, Locke, Defoe, James Joyce (Ulysses is still banned in some places), Rousseau, Goethe, Shelley, Byron. Darwin and Marx. The Papal index bans many books to Its adherents. Once critics remarked of George Eliot's Adam, Bede, that "we seem to be threatened with a literature of pregnancy!" Miss Stevens noted that morality is relative to time and place—contemporary literature is dangerous. There is also a tendency, she observed, to remark that other people may be corrupted, never oneself: one must therefore protect a host of innocent readers. One amazing fact is that critics of "immoral literature" indulge In extraordinary fury: a critic of Swinburne once stormed over the "feverish carnality of a schoolboy" which he claimed Swinburne had —it throws an interesting light on Victorian schools … Magazines of course benefit both ways from this sort of review: in reviewing a salacious book they get readers, and In doing so salaciously they are being moral.

Cartoon of man jumping and knocking over a table