Even Agatha Christie fails the test from a political point of view. A few weeks after the controversy regarding revisions and language corrections in the books of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming in the name of a new common sensibility, politically correct, a new one opens, which concerns Agatha Christie
Some of Agatha Christie’s most famous works have been screened by “sensitive readers” (very popular figures in British and American publishing who scrutinize publications for offensive terms and descriptions with the aim of improving diversity and inclusion in the publishing sector) and partially proofread by to the publisher Harper Collins, which aligns itself by removing terms considered offensive and racist.
The revision, which began in 2020, will see the novels reissued in a cleaned-up version of the stories and characters that Christie told from 1920 to 1976, the year of his death. The reflections of the rigorous Hercule Poirot and the complicated investigations of Miss Marple will be rewritten, in some cases censored, with passages that will be completely eliminated.
The terms commonly used in Christie’s time, which classified people from an ethnic group other than white British and who often suffered from a colonialist mentality and conditioned by racist prejudices, will be cut. Words like “Jew”, “Gypsy”, but also “Oriental” and “Indian temperament”, used to characterize a character, disappear, and “natives” become “locals”.
In Poirot on the Nile, all references to the physical appearance of non-English characters will disappear, comments referring to children with “disgusting eyes and noses” will also be deleted, and the servant will no longer be identified as a black man. Or in Miss Marple in the Caribbean, we will no longer read the protagonist’s reflection on the hotel employee with “so beautiful and white teeth”.
The controversy was immediately mounted on social networks: many readers talk about a “crime” committed against the writer and her works and there are those who, more diplomatically, invoke the maintenance of an original edition alongside the revised and corrected one, as was proposed already by the Puffin publishing house, which offers a “classic collection”, without posthumous interventions.
For the most important news of the day, transmitted in real time and presented equidistantly, LIKE our Facebook page!
Follow Mediafax on Instagram to see spectacular images and stories from around the world!
The content of the www.mediafax.ro website is intended exclusively for your information and personal use. It is forbidden republication of the content of this site without the consent of MEDIAFAX. To obtain this agreement, please contact us at [email protected].