Joyce's Ulysses and Miller's Tropic of Cancer were both banned in the US on obscenity grounds. But it is rare for a book to be banned at a national level.
You may be confusing prior restraint with illegality. It's very hard to block a book from being published in the first place in the US. (Eg Pentagon Papers) That does not mean that you can't be prosecuted for publishing it.
Yes, the US TEMPORARY banned the publication of one important book of English literature because of a stupid prudish law, which I didn't know, sry. That doesn't mean that's not the most free country when it comes to publishing books, for better or worse, and it has been like that since forever.
US blocked the publication of one book because of a prudish law a century ago for a decade, and then the prudes got their ass kicked at the supreme court, and this somehow grants a comparison with Soviet Russia 🙃
@NickEast@bookstodon@litstudies@histodons@politicalscience Slightly unrelated, but also kinda related: 1984 is trash and we must come together as a society to accept that the author and his book are disgusting. The book is extremely unrealistic, too, even for the times back then.
@rato That could've been summarized as a short story of maybe 20 pages. The book was waaay too long for what it offered. The vivid descriptions of every touch he gave that girl were too much. Also his dreams about that white teenage girl he fantasized about were unbearable for me to read.
@rato Well, if you believe in "communism = bad" then it definitely does. That is the merit I took away from it, personally. What I don't understand, though, is why the US banned the book? The content was obviously describing the cult surrounding politicians like Stalin & how through the Russian Revolution people were promised improvements, but only ended up having a degraded quality of life, which is in fact untrue btw. The oppression remained, but women were treated more equally, education became mandatory & workers were finally guaranteed some rights. Stalin was definitely a horrible person, tho.
It seems like Orwell was obsessed with painting communism bad, considering he had another book about the workers taking over the means of production and them ending up back to square one, because one of them decided to become someone like the previous owner. He makes a revolution against the status quo seem so pointless, maybe with the intention of getting people to not even try.
@rato That is true, however, you forget how authoritarianism in the book is described as being a thing of the post-revolution era which to me seems like a direct & superficial comparison to the Russian Revolution, which in my eyes is an attempt at painting communism as bad, which as we all know wasn’t the cause for all the cruelty in Soviet Russia.
@NickEast Maybe the political aspect of it is fine, but the book as a whole is oversaturated with sex that I had a hard time not giving up on it. It is definitely overrated, the trash part is just my opinion 😊
@rainbowdash Well, we all have opinions, including authors 😀
I'm sure somewhere there's someone who thinks the sex part of it are fine, and the politocs makes it hard not to give up on it...
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