Popular Culture
- In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 chapter six Emory Bortz says, "I've been pirated, me and Wharfinger, we've been Bowdlerized in reverse or something."
- In the Moral Orel television programme, Moralton's town library is named the Thomas Bowdler Library; most of the library's books are censored (Episode 2, "God's Greatest Gift")
- In the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde, the Jurisfiction police who monitor the textual integrity of all books written and unwritten are constantly battling the Bowdlerisers, who attempt to erase material that they find offensive.
- In Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan's 1884 comic opera Princess Ida, Lady Psyche suggests that students at a women's university who wish to study the classics should get their editions "Bowdlerised". In Patience, Gilbert made an allusion to Bowdler's preface to the expurgated Shakespeare. Bowdler announced his desire to make Shakespeare accessible "without incurring the danger of falling unawares among words and expressions which are of such a nature as to raise a blush on the cheek of modesty"; a character in Patience declares, "I believe I am right in saying that there is not one word in that decalet which is calculated to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty."
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Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity.”
—John Lennon (1940–1980)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)