Monday, 8 September 2025

There shall be a twenty-year ban on novels set in Oxford and Cambridge

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 

  1. Where people revert to the 'natural condition' of man
  2. About incest
  3. Set in abbatoirs
  4. Set in Oxford and Cambridge (as above)
  5. Set in South America (quota system)
  6. With scenes of bestiality
  7. About small forgotten wars in distant parts of the British Empire
  8. Where any major character is identified by a single letter
  9. About other novels
  10. With 'allegorical, metaphorical, allusive, offstage, imprecise and ambiguous uses of God' 

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