![]() ![]() ![]() Leaving the works unchanged, with offensive and sometimes blatantly racist phrases throughout, could alienate new audiences and damage an author’s reputation and legacy.īut altering a text carries its own risks. In 2021, Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company, including rights for classics such as “The BFG,” for a reported $1 billion. Authors like Dahl, Christie and Fleming have, together, sold billions of copies of books, and their novels have spawned lucrative film franchises. The financial and cultural stakes of the exercise are enormous. “I don’t believe we need to leave what I would term offensive language in our books, because frankly all I care about is that people can enjoy Agatha Christie stories forever.” “My great-grandmother would not have wanted to offend anyone,” said James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson, and the chairman and chief executive of Agatha Christie Ltd. The effort has left publishers and literary estates grappling with how to preserve an author’s original intent while ensuring that their work continues to resonate - and sell.įinding the right balance is a delicate act: part business decision, part artful conjuring of the worldview of an author from another era in order to adapt it to the present. While some changes have been made to books published in decades past, often with little fanfare, many of the current attempts to remove offensive language are systematic and have drawn intense public scrutiny. Classics by Roald Dahl have been stripped of adjectives like “fat” and “ugly” along with references to characters’ gender and skin color. In Agatha Christie’s novels, terms like “Oriental,” “Gypsy” and “native” have been taken out, and revised versions of Ian Fleming’s “James Bond” books will be scrubbed of racist and sexist phrases. ![]() The estates of several revered literary figures are altering portions of well-known works to conform to current sensibilities, stirring a heated debate among readers and the literary world over whether, and how, classics should be updated. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |