4) There shall be a twenty-year ban on novels set in Oxford and Cambridge, and a ten year ban on other university fiction. No ban on fiction set in polytechnics (though no subsidy to encourage it). No ban on novels set in primary schools; a ten-year ban on secondary-school fiction. A partial ban on growing-up novels (one per author allowed). A partial ban on novels written in the historic present (again, one per author). A total ban on on novels where the main character is a journalist or a television presenter.
J. Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), 111-2
Actually, the whole list of proposed literary bans is great. In full, the narrator bans novels
- Where people revert to the 'natural condition' of man
- About incest
- Set in abbatoirs
- Set in Oxford and Cambridge (as above)
- Set in South America (quota system)
- With scenes of bestiality
- About small forgotten wars in distant parts of the British Empire
- Where any major character is identified by a single letter
- About other novels
- With 'allegorical, metaphorical, allusive, offstage, imprecise and ambiguous uses of God'
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