"Fictional stories have long been imagined to hold an uncanny power over hearts and minds. These days, everybody frets about fiction: according to the National Coalition Against Censorship, the current wave of book bans is the worst since the 1980s, and our cultural debates are consumed by questions about the politics and moral responsibility of storytelling. Can readers and viewers, at any age, be harmed by what they read and see? In Dangerous Fictions, Lyta Gold traces arguments both historical and contemporary that have labeled fiction as dark, immoral, frightening, or poisonous; within each she asks, how "dangerous" is fiction, really? And what about it provokes waves of moral panic and even censorship?"--
In a political moment when social panics over literature are at their peak, Dangerous Fictions is a mind-expanding treatise on the nature of fictional stories as cultural battlegrounds for power.
Fictional stories have long held an uncanny power over hearts and minds, especially those of young people. In Dangerous Fictions, Lyta Gold traces arguments both historical and contemporary that have labeled fiction as dark, immoral, frightening, or poisonous. Within each she asks: How dangerous is fiction, really? And what about it provokes waves of moral panic and even censorship?
Gold argues that any panic about art is largely a disguised panic about power. There have been versions of these same fights over fiction for centuries. By exposing fiction as a social danger and a battleground of immediate public concern, we can see what each side really wantsthe right to shape the future of a world deeply in flux and a distraction from more pressing material concerns about money, access, and the hard work of politics.
From novels about people driven insane by reading novels to copaganda TV shows that influence how viewers regard the police, Gold uses her signature wit, research, and fearless commentary to point readers toward a more substantial question: Fiction may be dangerous to us, but arent we also dangerous to it?
