Thomas Bowdler was an English physician known for publishing The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's plays edited by his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler. The two sought a version they saw as more appropriate than the original for 19th-century women and children. Bowdler also published works reflecting an interested knowledge of continental Europe. His last work was an expurgation of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published posthumously in 1826 under the supervision of his nephew and biographer, Thomas Bowdler the Younger. From his name derives the eponym verb bowdlerise or bowdlerize, meaning to expurgate or to censor something through the omission of elements deemed unsuited to children in literature and films and on television.
Vanity Fair is a novel by the English author William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847 to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, which reflects both its satirisation of early 19th-century British society and the many illustrations drawn by Thackeray to accompany the text. It was published as a single volume in 1848 with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero, reflecting Thackeray's interest in deconstructing his era's conventions regarding literary heroism. It is sometimes considered the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel.
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure—popularly known as Fanny Hill—is an erotic novel by the English novelist John Cleland first published in London in 1748. Written while the author was in debtors' prison in London, it is considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of the novel". It is one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history.
Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
Dalkey Archive Press is an American publisher of fiction, poetry, foreign translations and literary criticism specializing in the publication or republication of lesser-known, often avant-garde works. The company has offices in Funks Grove, Illinois, in Dublin, and in London. The publisher is named for the novel The Dalkey Archive, by the Irish author Flann O'Brien. It is owned by nonprofit publisher Deep Vellum.
Monique Wittig was a French author, philosopher and feminist theorist who wrote about abolition of the sex-class system and coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". Her groundbreaking work is titled The Straight Mind and Other Essays. She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.
Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven was a German avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada. She was considered one of the most controversial and radical women artists of the era.
Amelia is a sentimental novel written by Henry Fielding and published in December 1751. It was the fourth and final novel written by Fielding, and it was printed in only one edition while the author was alive, although 5,000 copies were published of the first edition. Amelia follows the life of Amelia and Captain William Booth after they are married. It contains many allusions to classical literature and focuses on the theme of marriage and feminine intelligence, but Fielding's stance on gender issues cannot be determined because of the lack of authorial commentary discussing the matter. Although the novel received praise from many writers and critics, it received more criticism from Fielding's competition, possibly resulting from the "paper war" in which the author was involved.
Ann Quin was a British writer noted for her experimental style. The author of Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), she died by drowning in 1973 at the age of 37.
Arkadii Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko was a Russian poet, writer, translator, and lecturer. He is considered the foremost representative of language poetry in contemporary Russian literature.
Rikki Ducornet is an American writer, poet, and artist. Her work has been described as “linguistically explosive and socially relevant,” and praised for “deploy[ing] tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit.”
Paul C. Metcalf was an American writer. He wrote in verse and prose. Devoted admirers included Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds. His books include Will West (1956), Genoa (1965), Patagoni (1971), Apalache (1976), The Middle Passage (1976), Zip Odes (1979), and U.S. Dept. of the Interior (1980). He was the great-grandson of one of his major literary influences, Herman Melville.
An expurgation of a work, also known as a bowdlerization, fig-leaf edition or censorship by political correctness is a form of censorship that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work or other type of writing or media.
Roger Andrew Caras was an American naturalist, animal welfare activist, wildlife photographer and writer.
Danielle Dutton is an American writer and publisher.
Steven Moore is an American author and literary critic. Best known as the primary authority on the novelist William Gaddis, he is the author of the two-volume study The Novel: An Alternative History.
Miriam Constance Beaumont Vaughan, better known by her pseudonym Olive Moore, was a modernist English writer best known for three well-esteemed novels: Celestial Seraglio (1929), Spleen (1930), and Fugue (1932), and for the acerbic essay collection The Apple Is Bitten Again (1934). She also produced an essay on D.H. Lawrence, entitled Further Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, which was privately printed in 1933 and included in her essay collection. Her Collected Writings was published in 1992.
Alan Gribben is a professor emeritus of English at Auburn University at Montgomery in Alabama and a Mark Twain scholar. He was distinguished research professor from 1998 to 2001 and the Dr. Guinevera A. Nance Alumni Professor from 2006 to 2009. He engendered widespread controversy in 2011 when he announced the publication of expurgated versions of Twain's works.
The Family Shakespeare is a collection of expurgated Shakespeare plays, edited by Thomas Bowdler and his sister Henrietta ("Harriet"), intended to remove any material deemed too racy, blasphemous, or otherwise sensitive for young or female audiences, with the ultimate goal of creating a family-friendly rendition of Shakespeare's plays. The Family Shakespeare is one of the most often cited examples of literary censorship, despite its original family-friendly intentions. The Bowdler name is also the origin of the term "bowdlerise", meaning to omit parts of a work on moral grounds.
Tynset is a lyrical work of prose published in 1965 by the German writer Wolfgang Hildesheimer. Often described as a novel, although not by Hildesheimer himself, it is a monologue of the thoughts of an insomniac over the course of a sleepless night. The central theme of Tynset, one of Hildesheimer's major works, is resignation in face of an absurd world. The first-person narrator from Tynset is also found in other works by Hildesheimer, and displays similarities with Hildesheimer himself. The work is named after the Norwegian township Tynset, which the narrator imagines travelling to.
