Editing Nursery rhyme (section)

==Nursery rhyme revisionism==
[[File:The Black sheep illustrated by William Wallace Denslow.jpg|thumb|"[[Baa, Baa, Black Sheep]]", from a 1901 illustration by [[W. W. Denslow|William Wallace Denslow]]]]

There have been several attempts across the world to revise nursery rhymes (along with fairy tales and popular songs). As recently as the late 18th century, rhymes like "[[Little Robin Redbreast]]" were occasionally cleaned up for a young audience.{{sfn|Opie|Opie|1997|pp=371–372}} In the late 19th century, the major concern seems to have been violence and crime, which led some children's publishers in the United States like Jacob Abbot and Samuel Goodrich to change Mother Goose rhymes.<ref>S. Wadsworth, ''In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "classes" in Nineteenth-century America'' (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), p. 22.</ref>

In the early and mid-20th centuries, this was a form of [[Expurgation|bowdlerisation]], concerned with some of the more violent elements of nursery rhymes and led to the formation of organisations like the British "Society for Nursery Rhyme Reform".<ref>N. E. Dowd, D. G. Singer, R. F. Wilson. ''Handbook of children, culture, and violence'' (Sage, 2005), p. 136.</ref> [[Psychoanalysis|Psychoanalysts]] such as [[Bruno Bettelheim]] strongly criticised this revisionism, because it weakened their usefulness to both children and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues and it has been argued that revised versions may not perform the functions of [[catharsis]] for children, or allow them to imaginatively deal with violence and danger.<ref>Jack Zipes, ''The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World'', p. 48, {{ISBN|0-312-29380-1}}.</ref>

In the late 20th century, revisionism of nursery rhymes became associated with the idea of [[political correctness]]. Most attempts to reform nursery rhymes on this basis appear to be either very small scale, light-hearted updating, like Felix Dennis's ''When Jack Sued Jill – Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times'' (2006), or satires written as if from the point of view of political correctness to condemn reform.<ref>F. Dennis, ''When Jack Sued Jill–Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times'' (Ebury, 2006).</ref> The controversy in Britain in 1986 over changing the language of "[[Baa, Baa, Black Sheep]]" because it was alleged in the popular press, that it was seen as racially dubious, was based only on a rewriting of the rhyme in one private nursery, as an exercise for the children.<ref>J. Curran, J. Petley, I. Gaber, ''Culture wars: the media and the British left'' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 85–107.</ref>