Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

Richard Ovenden · Harvard University Press / John Murray (UK), 2020

tlte-cite:jaffna-1981-ovenden-2020

Editorial gloss

Ovenden — Director of the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford — delivers the authoritative recent synthesis on the deliberate destruction of libraries and archives from Antiquity to the 21st century. Shortlisted for the 2021 Wolfson History Prize and reviewed in *The Guardian* (10 Sept 2020). While covering a broad sweep, the book's theoretical chapters on state-sponsored destruction of minority cultural memory are directly applicable to the Jaffna case, and it has been cited in academic work on the 1981 burning.

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https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674271104

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case suppression
jaffna library 1981
cultural destruction

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