Agatha Christie's novels also "corrected": via the passages deemed offensive or racist, there is controversy
"Natives" becomes "locals", eliminated some words normally used at the time of the queen of detective stories: "Jew", "Negro", "Oriental", "Indian temperament". Some parts have been completely removed
Cancel culture strikes again in the United Kingdom: after the corrections in the books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, the texts of Agatha Christie's novels have also been revised in the name of political correctness.
The publisher HarperCollins, reports the British press, has partially corrected some of the works of the yellow queen to take into account contemporary sensibilities, eliminating terms now considered offensive or racist.
A revision that began in 2020, which is leading to new "cleaned" editions of the stories featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Not only the correction of some words, there is also the rewriting or in some cases the removal of entire passages which has attracted strong criticism on social media.
Via terms normally used in Christie's time to classify people of a different ethnicity than the white British and who were affected in some cases by a colonialist mentality and racist prejudices. Words like "black", "Jew", "gypsy" disappear, but also "Oriental" and "Indian temperament" to characterize a character, while the "natives" become the "locals".
Some passionate readers of the writer speak of murder, others sarcastically rewrite the titles, and "Murder on the Orient Express" becomes, for example, "Murder on the Eastern Express".
(Unioneonline/L)
