Publisher warns readers about classic literature

Publisher Penguin Random House is republishing literary works by Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway with a disclaimer that warns about “cultural representations” and “language”.

“The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein,” reads the warning, which will be placed on copies of Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises.

Penguin Random House’s decision to include the disclaimer comes after academic institutions in Scotland last year began warning students about The Old Man and the Sea over “graphic fishing scenes,” as well as other literary works.

The University of the Highlands and Islands, comprising 13 colleges and research institutions, has been cautioning students about reading literature such as Homer’s The Iliad and Beowulf for “scenes of violent close combat”. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was flagged for “violent murder and cruelty” and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet for “stabbing, poison and suicide”. These warnings, said the university, “enable students to make informed choices.”

Hemingway’s novels are just some of the iconic works that have narrowly escaped Penguin Random House’s attempts to rewrite with newspeak.

Earlier this year, the world’s largest publishing company recanted its decision to rewrite the works of Roald Dahl following backlash. Penguin Random House subsidiary Puffin Books and Roald Dahl Story Co. teamed up with Inclusive Minds, an organization that monitors children’s books for unapproved speech.

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for instance, Augustus Gloop was no longer “fat” but “enormous”. Oompa-Loompas were no longer “small men” but “small people”. Similarly, the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach became “Cloud People”. 

The following sentence was completely removed:

Mike Teavee himself had no less than eighteen toy pistols of various sizes hanging from belts around his body, and every now and again he would leap up into the air and fire off half a dozen rounds from one or another of these weapons.

The witty foxes in Fantastic Mr. Fox were changed to female. In Matilda, a reference to renowned male author Rudyard Kipling was removed, and a reference to famed female author Jane Austen was added. “Eight nutty little idiots” became “eight nutty little boys”.

The “fat little brown mouse” in The Witches became a “little brown mouse”. The sentence, “‘Here’s your little boy,’ she said. ‘He needs to go on a diet’” became, “Here’s your little boy.”

A description in Matilda of Miss Trunchbull’s “great horsey face” became her “face”. Where a character “turned white”, they instead “turned pale”.

In James and the Giant Peach, Miss Spider’s head was no longer described as black, and neither were the two black tractors mentioned in the story. The Earthworm, instead of having “lovely pink skin”, instead had “lovely smooth skin”.

In The Twits, Mrs. Twit was no longer “ugly and beastly” but “beastly,” and a “weird African language” was no longer weird.

In The Witches, the narrator asks, “‘But what about the rest of the world?’ I cried. ‘What about ‘America and France and Holland and Germany? And what about Norway?’” The sentence was censored to remove the names of the countries.

This month, a book slated for publishing by Penguin Random House subsidiary Riverside Books was canceled altogether after receiving backlash over the novel being set in Russia.