Reading: A Very Short Introduction by Belinda Jack

Author:Belinda Jack [Jack, Belinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198820581
Google: Pt-RDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0198820585
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-04-07T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Forbidden reading

Book burnings

Censorship, book burnings, and secret reading highlight the relationship between reading and power, and hence the relationship between limiting access to reading and political control. But from the very beginning there have been dissidents who refused to give up the intellectual freedom provided by their reading in the face of despotic regimes. Ovid provides an early example. Later, when Christianity became the state religion in Rome, Emperor Constantine tried Arius and the Council of Nicæa banned his doctrine and ordered that the Arian ‘sect’s’ books be burned. The Nazis famously burnt books. The novelist E. M. Forster, in one of his anti-Nazi broadcasts of 1940, used book burnings in Berlin as symptomatic of their whole enterprise. Of these he said, ‘The Nazis wished it to symbolise their cultural outlook, and it will. It took place on May 13 (sic), 1933. That night twenty-five thousand volumes were destroyed outside the University of Berlin, in the presence of some forty thousand people. Most people enjoy a blaze, and we are told that the applause was tremendous’ (see Figure 10).

10. Nazi book burning.

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