Bowdlerization

We have had adaptations of Dickens and Scott, and even George Eliot, for children, and Bowdlerizations of the Arabian Nights and the popular fairy tales.

For other Bowdlerizations and deletions the publishers and their editor are responsible.

Translator notes that for Bowdlerizations and deletions the publishers are responsible.

Part II begins with discussions on doubling of roles, Bowdlerizations, theatre promptbooks, actor-adapters, male domination, repertory companies, copying errors in collation, and detail of methodology.

(re hymnal revisions - or Bowdlerizations, if you like) I believe the Episcopalians are also dropping Onward Christian Soldiers because of its militarism.

But just as Bowdlerizations of Shakespeare seem, from a late twentieth-century perspective, to have lost something essential to the genius of the original, so nineteenth-century alterations to The Garden of the Soul may seem to us to have damaged the integrity of Challoner’s message.

Disregard a score of notorious exceptions — Pepys, Boswell, Casanova — and we encounter a blanket of silence, or at least of self-censorship, magnified by the indefatigable excisions and Bowdlerizations of subsequent editors.

Phyllis Silverman Kramer’s ‘Rahab: From Peshat to Pedagogy, or: The Many Faces of a Heroine’ discusses Bowdlerizations of Rahab’s story prepared for Jewish pupils.

In the Internet age, the expression ‘guided public opinion’ has come to signify a range of propaganda techniques from egregious Bowdlerization of texts to employing an unofficial army of pro-government Internet commentators who are rumoured to be paid the equivalent of fifty Chinese cents per posting and who are therefore dubbed the ‘Fifty-cent Gang’ (see also Chapter 5).

In both cases, a key ingredient has been the drastic infantilization of the national culture: from the pious idea of ‘family reading’ that launched the Bowdlerization of Victorian literature, to the syrupy replica—the family, smiling at its TV—that has put American entertainment to sleep.