My New Year's resolution is to read, summarize and discard a 2-foot high pile of literary reviews I have had sitting around for well over a decade.
Here is what I learned this time:
Lorna Hutson reviews a book by Alastair Fowler, a distinguished Renaissance art historian, who argues that single-point perspective was not the Copernican revolution that is presented in introductory art history classes, so much as one of several ways of seeing which gradually became predominant. Fowler then goes to apply this observation to the analysis of contemporary literature arguing, for example, that there are sequences in Shakespeare's plays that are not intended to represent strict temporal succession - Hutson seems not quite ready to reach the same conclusion about literature.
"Potent Brews: A Social History of Alcohol in East Africa 1850-1999" by Justin Willis describes, among other things, how beer became firmly established as the signifier of success and wealth in preference to indigenous home brews (there's more to it than that)
A poet of whom I have never heard, Tom Raworth, is prolific enough to have a 600 page compendium published.
A feminist literary critic named Terry Castle issues a collection of essays called "Boss Ladies, Watch Out!" in which she vents her frustration with what she considers the dreariness of feminist literary criticism as it developed in the 1980s. In regretting that the proliferation of academic study of 18th and 19th century women writers has inflated some reputations, she mentions a number of books that I have never heard of and may or may not ever read: Sarah Fielding's "David Simple", "The Female Quixote" by Charlotte Lennox, Eliza Fenwick's "Secresy" ("excruciating") and Sarah Scott's "Millennium Hall" (called proto-feminist, even as it describes "the supposed consolations of living in a grim all-female community where one does nothing but sew all day and read aloud from Scripture with one's pious fellow virgins." Castle also regrets the amount of time she spent on the Gothic genre but this reminds me that I have not read "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and "Melmoth the Wanderer" and still might like to. The reviewer, John Mullan, says overall the collection is excellent and one should not be put off by the title, or the jacket blurb from Susan Sontag which employs the adjective "sassy."
Malcolm Muggeridge and George Orwell had some (previously) unpublished correspondence from the last year or two of Orwell's life.
This being 2003, high-brow journals were obliged to devote some space to The Matrix and Harry Potter - in the case of the former, attempting to make sense of the second of the trilogy before the third had come out was inevitably an uphill battle.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Times Literary Supplement, May 21st 2004
I enjoy the TLS for the quality of its writing and erudition and I like being reminded that when I think I know a few things, relatively speaking I know nothing. Many of the reviews are taking on fairly arcane differences of opinion on a subject of which I have scarcely an inkling - so, in that spirit, here are some things of which I have now heard.
Margaret Cavendish (neé Lucas, 1623-1673) was an exceptionally prolific writer at a time when women scarcely wrote at all. Dubbed "Mad Madge", in a presciently Fleet Street manner, for her forcefully held somewhat unconventional opinions, she has since become increasingly well-regarded.
Michèle Le Doeuff's "The Sex of Knowing" addresses the gendered nature of simply being educated. The review of the book begins by explaining the term "bluestocking", once an insult applied by aristocrats to the Cromwellian men who wore their comfortable home woolens to Parliament (picture contemporary rural representatives being called "the sweat pants brigade" or something to that effect), it later became applied only to women. The book itself discusses examples like the epikleros, a Greek term for "a daughter of a man who had no male heirs" and so might inherit [wiki]. The author coins the term "epicleracy" to describe the set of women for whom that was case being more likely to be allowed to be educated.
Wace, a mononymic writer of the 12th century, is best known for "the Roman de Brut, a verse history of Britain, the Roman de Rou, a verse history of the Dukes of Normandy". He wrote in Norman, an Old French regional language, part of a group that includes variations in the channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey - Jèrriais, in the former, is still in declining use. Scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries attempted to impose an additional name, so he is sometimes called Robert Wace, though the historical support for this is disputed.
Nicholas Basbanes on the "gentle madness" of book collecting - someone I need to know more about!
Frances Hodgson Burnett, an Englishwoman who moved to America, wrote dozens of books, made lots of money, had a celebrity life, gave us "Little Lord Fauntleroy".
John Fowles' journals of the 1950s might be worth a look as another alienated Englishman of that era - his first literary success did not come until age 37, so he had lots of time to be resentful.
Margaret Cavendish (neé Lucas, 1623-1673) was an exceptionally prolific writer at a time when women scarcely wrote at all. Dubbed "Mad Madge", in a presciently Fleet Street manner, for her forcefully held somewhat unconventional opinions, she has since become increasingly well-regarded.
Michèle Le Doeuff's "The Sex of Knowing" addresses the gendered nature of simply being educated. The review of the book begins by explaining the term "bluestocking", once an insult applied by aristocrats to the Cromwellian men who wore their comfortable home woolens to Parliament (picture contemporary rural representatives being called "the sweat pants brigade" or something to that effect), it later became applied only to women. The book itself discusses examples like the epikleros, a Greek term for "a daughter of a man who had no male heirs" and so might inherit [wiki]. The author coins the term "epicleracy" to describe the set of women for whom that was case being more likely to be allowed to be educated.
Wace, a mononymic writer of the 12th century, is best known for "the Roman de Brut, a verse history of Britain, the Roman de Rou, a verse history of the Dukes of Normandy". He wrote in Norman, an Old French regional language, part of a group that includes variations in the channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey - Jèrriais, in the former, is still in declining use. Scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries attempted to impose an additional name, so he is sometimes called Robert Wace, though the historical support for this is disputed.
Nicholas Basbanes on the "gentle madness" of book collecting - someone I need to know more about!
Frances Hodgson Burnett, an Englishwoman who moved to America, wrote dozens of books, made lots of money, had a celebrity life, gave us "Little Lord Fauntleroy".
John Fowles' journals of the 1950s might be worth a look as another alienated Englishman of that era - his first literary success did not come until age 37, so he had lots of time to be resentful.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
