pcarefoote

Personal Information

Full Name

Pearce J. Carefoote

Bio

Pearce J. Carefoote is a librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library. He holds a PhD from the Catholic University of Louvain,
Belgium, and is the author of Forbidden Fruit: Banned, Censored, and
Challenged Books from Dante to Harry Potter (2007), and the article
"Government Censorship of Print" in the History of the Book in Canada, vol. 3 (2007).

Affiliation

University of Toronto

Country

Canada

Personal Statement About Topic

My interest in censorship originally derived from my studies of the old
Roman Index; it was renewed after 11 September 2001 when the attempt to
contextualize those tragic events was regularly curtailed in the media
by the new war on terror.

Case studies by Pearce J. Carefoote

Case study :

Censorship in Canada

From the banning of Molière in seventeenth-century Quebec to the challenges faced by Margaret Laurence for her novel The Diviners beginning in the 1970s, censorship has been a thorn in the side of Canada’s literary and publishing history. Government officials, customs agents, the church, the religious right, and arbiters of “social correctness” have played a major role in enforcing and influencing regulations regarding censorship. Their actions have led to the establishment, by authors, publishers, librarians, and citizens, of numerous groups and events designed to highlight the democratic rights of Canadians to buy and read books and magazines of their choice