Review article
Alice in a Land of Censorship: The Children’s World as a Place Where People Talk to Animals
Lidija Bernardić
; Sveučilište u Zagrebu, Hrvatska
Abstract
This paper offers a possible explanation of the political ban on distributing and reading Alice in Wonderland, which in China’s Hunan province came into force in 1931. The relations between people (especially rulers and other functionaries) and other animals and the element of communist ideology and its view of nature provide a key to understanding the proclaimed ideological and political unsuitability of this literary work. After interpreting the reasons why “giving language to animals” might be viewed as a subversive act at the time of the empowerment of communist rule in China, I interpose Alice within a feminist anthropological concept of “proximity to nature” to explain why girls (Alice), in their own children’s worlds, can understand other animals.
Keywords
animals; children’s world; censorship; communist ideology; feminist anthropology; speech
Hrčak ID:
154128
URI
Publication date:
23.12.2015.
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