The Little Professor

2003-10-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

The Little Professor is relocating to ritzier quarters at http://littleprofessor.typepad.com.

2003-10-10T18:22:00.000-07:00

Some of the responses to this post seesaw between acknowleding academic "lifestyle issues" and arguing that you can't complain about the market while refusing to apply to college located in X. On the one hand, I'm not very sympathetic to excessive pickiness: if I had held out for a job in a warm climate, I'd still be an adjunct. On the other hand, I suspect that most of us aren't "free" to take any position. Jews and other minorities have to think very carefully before taking jobs in certain areas (and no, that isn't code for "down South"). Academics with families can't just relocate to areas with poor schools. Two-career families may not be able to support losing the second career. Housing and rental prices can rule out accepting a position in a city like San Francisco or New York. (And people like myself who have been foolish enough to acquire nearly 5,000 books need a house, not a studio.)

Speaking of books, this week's acquisitions:

Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Anti-Semitism: A History (Sutton, 2002). General survey by a remarkably prolific historian (although not quite in the Jacob Neusner class there...).
Louis Edwards, Oscar Wilde Discovers America (Scribner, 2003). Historical novel about Wilde's 1882 trip to America, as seen through the eyes of his black valet, Traquair.
Una Pope-Hennessy, Agnes Strickland: Biographer of the Queens of England (Chatto & Windus, 1840). Only full-length study of the popular historian. An excerpt from Strickland's life of Jane Seymour is available online.
A. M. Fairbairn, Catholicism: Roman and Anglican (Hodder and Stoughton, 1899). A critique by a famous (and still influential) late-Victorian evangelical theologian.
Father Charles Chiniquy, The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional (Revell, 1880). Virulent and best-selling anti-Catholic screed by a priest-turned-Presbyterian.

2003-10-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Scattered musings:

1. I dislike writing exams.
2. Some professors think that allowing cheat sheets is a sign of the coming apocalypse, but I find that they force students to actually study for the exam.
3. This should win a prize for "Funniest Book Review Currently Featured on a Blog."
4. Elizabeth Rundle Charles' Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family was translated into German, Finnish, Danish, and Swedish. While the subject (Martin Luther) explains the German translation, why into Finnish? And why was Deborah Alcock's The Spanish Brothers: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century translated into Czech? (An even better question: why is it still in print?)
5. Life would be much easier for all concerned if somebody would publish a bibliography of Religious Tract Society fiction. Really. You try figuring out dates of first publication for some of those novels.

2003-10-06T19:03:00.000-07:00

I was startled by how much I actually remembered of Elizabeth R, considering that I was in elementary school when I first saw it. In terms of production values, the miniseries has the usual BBC problems: obvious sets, mediocre video quality, somewhat problematic acting once one gets beyond the principals. (The entire budget must have been blown on Elizabeth's gowns.) On the other hand, Glenda Jackson so effortlessly dominates the proceedings that, really, the viewer isn't paying much attention to anyone else. As in other biopic miniseries (bioseries?)--Disraeli: Portrait of a Romantic comes to mind--there's very little sense of temporality. Events just seem to happen, and only one thing seems to happen at a time. Thus, Mary Stuart appears, vanishes off the radar, then suddenly reappears in episode four, forcing the scriptwriter to engage in some desperate exposition. On the other hand, despite six different writers, the miniseries maintains a tight thematic ship. If there is little sense of temporality, there is certainly considerable reflection on mortality. For the filmmakers' Elizabeth, marriage and death are inextricably linked, reversing the traditional association of marriage and posterity. In some ways, the plot is an extended danse macabre, propelled by the tension between national and personal history. Existing simultaneously in "two bodies" as queen and woman, Elizabeth cannot find any safe way to marry both; the execution of Katherine Howard becomes for her an object lesson in the impossibility of royal marriage. As interpretations go, this struck me as considerably superior to that offered by the historical trainwreck Elizabeth, in which the queen gets it on with Robert Dudley. It was as though the makers of the later film couldn't even begin to imagine that somebody might opt for celibacy, let alone have plausible psychological reasons for doing so. (Fine performance by Cate Blanchett, though.)

Meanwhile, the undergraduates are preparing for midterms and the graduate students are gearing up for George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (scroll down for e-text). This is the first time I've taught the book, so we'll see how the students respond to the infamous ironic narrator. After that, it's the quarter break, or at least it would be if I didn't have exams to grade.

2003-10-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

I made a two-hour trek to Syracuse yesterday to participate in a reading group for upstate NY Victorianists. (Apparently, the University of Chicago has a good record in upstate NY--two fellow alumni were there.) What made this so fun was precisely what some people seem convinced no longer exists in academia: the joy of discovering new things, engaging in dialogue with other people, and discovering "resonances" (as one attendee put it). There is joy in the kaleidoscope of literary history. This kind of joy is different from that which derives from, say, the reading of a really great novel--reading Middlemarch for the first or fifth time, for example--but it's still a joy nonetheless.

(Er, yes, I do believe that there is such a thing as "great" literature. It's just that I tend to write about not-so-great literature.)

Meanwhile, Chun touches on an issue near and dear to my heart, namely, the difference between jargon and profundity. When it comes to literary criticism, I fear that I'm a strong believer in sound matching sense--a position I reached during my brief stint as a copyeditor, when I realized that most jargon could either be translated easily into plain style, in which case there was no reason for the jargon, or not translated into anything at all, in which case there was a problem. While there is legitimate technical jargon out there--the terms used in prosody, for example, or narratology--I can't be bothered with something that appears to have been written by the Postmodernism Generator. Even some of the shorthand terms are problematic. What does it mean to commit "violence" against a text? Why are we "interrogating" everything? Are imperialists really suffering from "anxiety"? I've seen some critics try to justify tangled, over-nominalized and over-abstract prose by arguing that they're trying to make the reader "think" (apparently, the ideas are insufficient to achieve that end) or that they're trying to demonstrate that language is not a neutral medium of communication (surely we've all figured that out by now?). That kind of writing does not "provoke" anything--er, save boredom, perhaps. (I should add that jargonism is not just a sin of the postmodernists: the last time I complained about style in a book review, I was reviewing a relatively conservative and certainly non-postmodern philosophy-and-lit study.)

Incidentally, I see that The Salt-Box (scroll down to Oct. 1) and I had similar job-hunting experiences, although it sounds like I'm more of a historicist than he is. I suspect that's what at issue is where we work: while there are certainly some teaching campuses where theoretical orientation is a Big Thing, most of them are far more interested in a potential faculty member's ability to talk to undergraduates. I don't think I was even asked about my "theoretical commitments," or lack thereof.

2003-10-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

This week's acquisition (slow week):

The Martyr of Florence; Or, the Home of Fiesole (Shaw, 1887). Anti-Catholic historical novel set during the lifetime of Savonarola.

2003-10-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

Continuing my DVD kick, I've just started rewatching the brilliant miniseries Elizabeth R (1971). Coincidentally, my essay on royal life-writing for the women's history companion emphasized representations of Elizabeth I, precisely because she was the most problematic figure for nineteenth-century women writers: in a culture that had come to value the monarch insofar as it exemplified domestic virtues--the queen as national homemaker, as it were--there was little room for Elizabeth I's theatricality, political acumen, and apparent "inauthenticity." (I'm still waiting for my copy of this book; remind me to specify air mail next time...) The best online source for Elizabeth I is probably Luminarium: Elizabeth I (images, primary texts, secondary sources).

Meanwhile, today's lectures are a double dose of Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess". (The two students who are in both my Brit Lit survey and my intro to lit are going to have a severe case of deja vu, I fear.)

2003-10-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon reviewing episodes from the Granada Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, since I'd like to show an episode to my graduate students later in the semester. One of the problems with adapting Holmes to the screen, of course, is that the stories are so narrator-driven: the narratives are all about Watson watching Holmes and mediating his brilliance to the reader. Holmes himself would be insufferable as the narrator (and it's telling that the stories Holmes tells himself are among the weakest in the canon). But on screen, Watson can become a bit player, not to mention appear like a fool. While the Granada series did not invent the "intelligent Watson," it did do a nice job of inserting a certain distance between Watson-the-narrator and an imagined "real Watson," who's smarter than he lets on. (As I usually point out to students, Watson is in fact a brilliant observer.) In any event, I'm going back and forth between "The Resident Patient" and "The Norwood Builder," both of which allow us to see Watson's own deductive skills at work.

Tonight we finish off Bleak House in my graduate course. The undergraduates, meanwhile, are dealing with Tennyson and Keats (all about odes). The Tennyson is the standard undergraduate fare--"The Lotos-Eaters," "Ulysses," "The Lady of Shalott," and "Mariana"--but when I'm teaching upper-division Victorian poetry, I like to throw in "St. Simeon Stylites" as well. The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester has a fine page devoted to the Elaine of Astolat legend, which includes two versions of "The Lady of Shalott."

2003-09-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

The debate on scholarly publishing (see, e.g., here, here, and here) has unintentionally illuminated another issue: there is no actual data available on either a) tenure requirements or b) the amount of publication "required" to get a tenure-track job. I'm in a system that expects some publication for tenure, but not a book. (Yes, I wrote a book, but no, it's not required.) There are liberal arts colleges that emphasize teaching over publication, to the extent that many faculty never publish anything at all--and some may in fact be penalized for doing so--but there are also liberal arts colleges that require serious scholarship. Similarly, there are regional comprehensives with 4/4 or 5/5 loads that, thank goodness, do not expect much in the way of publications from their faculty--but then again, there are those that do. It's difficult to discuss a crisis or recommend policy changes unless we know what the policies are, although one can certainly make broader recommendations (e.g., schools with 4/4 + loads should require minimal publications for tenure).

And what about the perception that one "must publish" to get a tenure-track job? Again, it would be interesting to see some kind of survey examining the publication records of new hires*, categorized according to the number of years the candidate spent on the market, the graduate school "tier," and the type of school doing the hiring. As Donald E. Hall (CoHE link; reg. req.) points out, too much of a research focus can sink your application at a school like mine; not enough of one can sink your application at Yale. Some schools are really interested in promise, while others want achievement.

I'm not sure, incidentally, when scholarship was last widely available to a public audience. As both Janice Radway and Joan Shelley Rubin point out, Henry Canby was complaining about over-specialization in the early twentieth century. While pre-1950s work, say, may seem less "jargony," it is still highly specialized and hardly pleasure reading. Much of the work I've read from the 1940s and earlier attempts to offer the fullest possible catalog of data, often with surprisingly little argument attached. On the upside, this means that some of this scholarship, like Hillhouse's work on Scott's reception, remains extremely useful; on the downside, it also means that this scholarship remains almost completely unreadable, despite the absence of jargon. Or, looking at the European example, one might think about Auerbach's Mimesis (enjoyable to read, to be sure, but not something a non-academic would be likely or willing to pick up), or Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (rich mine of information, but again, not for the non-specialist). Strictly speaking, American academia has been "professional" since the late nineteenth century, with the kind of elite specialization that entails. There are a number of recent books on the disciplinary histories of English and history that may be relevant here.

*Bearing in mind that the relevant databases may not be up to date. (My last four publications are nowhere to be found in the MLA database, and one of them will certainly never appear there.)

2003-09-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

This week's acquisitions:

Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Mrs. Gerald's Niece (Burnes and Oates, 1886). A Catholic novel critiquing, among other things, High Church Anglicanism (for being hypocritical, it looks like).
Edna Lyall, To Right the Wrong (Hurst and Blackett, 1894). Historical novel about the English Civil War.
Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Victorian Fiction (Johns Hopkins, 1996). One of a crop of recent studies on the rhetorical function of direct address to the reader.
Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Johns Hopkins, 2000). Critiques recent attempts to collapse the boundary-line between historical and fictional discourses.
Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Johns Hopkins, 1995). Feminist interpretation of how eighteenth-century authors constructed the self through writing.
Thomas Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Johns Hopkins, 2000). A counter to attacks on objectivity in recent philosophies of history.
Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of the Academic Intellectual in the United States (Johns Hopkins, 1997). Fraught relations between the professoriate and American culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

2003-09-24T16:37:00.000-07:00

Scattered musings:

1. I hereby propose that anyone who wishes to make "knowing" or "incisive" or, heavens forbid, "satirical" generalizations about the foibles of academics must demonstrate a prior acquaintance with the Microcosmographia Academica (1908). Because, you know, there's really no reason to reinvent the wheel.

2. Moving thousands of books around is hard on the arms. And legs. Not too good for the back either, come to think of it.

3. The end of those two essays for the companion is slowly but surely coming into sight. Which is good, because I've just received an inquiry about doing something else. And I'd like to finish off my article about Emily Sarah Holt, which I haven't been able to touch since June. And there's still an index looming on the horizon...

4. I'm currently reading Janice Radway's A Feeling For Books, which is a fascinating failure, albeit an interesting and informative one. I can see what she's trying to do with the mix of personal and scholarly discourses, which enacts her own sense of the conflict between professional and pleasure reading, but in the end it produces a slightly unsatisfying text. Still, the historical background is genuinely useful--especially since it shows that the recent Oprah book club brouhaha repeats a debate from several decades earlier.

2003-09-19T18:56:00.000-07:00

This week's acquisitions (good thing the second new bookcase is coming next week...):

Louisa C. Silke, Steadfast and True: A Tale of the Huguenots (RTS). Probably the 1905 reprint of this historical novel about the aftermath of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Harriette E. Burch, Wind and Wave Fulfilling His Word: A Story of the Siege of Leyden, 1574 (RTS, 1901). Historical novel about the resistance to Catholicism in Holland.
Emily Sarah Holt, It Might Have Been: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (RTS). Guy Fawkes and co.; this being Holt, anti-Catholic as per the usual. Not her usual publisher, interestingly enough.
James Bettley, The Art of the Book: From Medieval Manuscript to Graphic Novel (Victoria & Albert, 2001). Lots of color plates covering topics like engraving, book binding, photography, illumination, etc.
Friedrich Schiller, Mary Stuart (Penguin, 1999). Schiller's classic drama about the clash of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, including an imaginary encounter between the two queens. Project Gutenberg has a copy; the play also comes up in this essay on British images of Mary Stuart, which links to a number of contemporary reviews.
Louisa May Alcott, Work (Penguin, 1994). Woman seeks independence through labor in nineteenth-century America.
Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002). Essays exploring the roots of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, in response to the current revisionist debates in Reformation studies.

2003-09-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

Lord Lloyd-Webber's Pre-Raphaelite exhibition is taking a bit of a thwacking from the Guardian, which is using it as a convenient blunt instrument for attacking Victorian art in general. (Theatre critic Michael Billington is kinder.) Not, of course, that contemporaries were always positive either. Oddly, I sympathize...sort of. Some Pre-Raphaelite painting seems deficient in craftmanship (weird foreshortenings, for example, which can't be explained by the PRB aesthetic program). Sometimes the colors can be garish. Victorian painting in general can be deadening in its sentimentality, when it isn't simply being bizarre. (Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's habit of painting diaphanously-clad classical figures lying gracefully recumbent upon, of all things, cold hard marble comes to mind--as it has often come to the minds of others.) But...but still. I don't object to the complex and heavily layered symbolism of much Pre-Raphaelite painting. John Everett Millais went on to become a brilliant portraitist. Moreover, there is real fascination and pleasure to be found in Victorian narrative paintings, which demand to be read like novels. And certainly Victorian artistic practices were far more varied than I suspect the Lloyd-Webber collection lets on. In other words, I don't think that one has to be surreptitious about enjoying Victorian painting.

2003-09-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

Tonight's graduate study menu includes a generous helping of my favorite Dickens novel, Bleak House (1852-53). Reading the novel straight through like this does not quite convey the Victorian experience of the text, released as it was in parts. (As I explained to my students, reading a serialized or part-published novel might take well over a year, during which time you'd have several other books on the burner. It's always worth taking a look at where the novelist started and stopped the serialized sections, since that affected the overall rhythm of the plot.) The always-reliable Victorian Web includes a couple of brief critical pieces on the novel; see also these reflections by G. K. Chesterton, one of Dickens' most influential early twentieth-century critics. This useful page offers spoilers, a map, and a run-down of the principal characters. There's even a Bleak House museum. For more information on Dickens' illustrator Hablot K. Browne (a.k.a. "Phiz"), see here; his illustrations for David Copperfield are also online. (The Charles Dickens Page includes brief biographical sketches of all of Dickens' illustrators.)

2003-09-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

This week's acquisitions (and there were quite a few of them...):

Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England 1760 to 1860 (Johns Hopkins, 1999). The role of women in shaping the field of botany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Robin Lippincott, Mr. Dalloway (Sarabande, 1999). Rewrites Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway; cf. Michael Cunningham's The Hours.
Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 13th American ed. from the last London ed. (Harper, 1824). One of the most significant rhetorics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (This copy is in surprisingly good shape--many surviving copies are ex-school texts and, therefore, torn to shreds.) You can find details about Blair and summaries of the lectures here.
Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (Christian Classics, 1990). A biography of Newman by one of the leading specialists in nineteenth-century British and Irish Catholic history.
C. Grey, The Early Years of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort... (Harper & Brothers, 1867). Biography originally written for circulation within the royal family after Prince Albert's death.
David Norton, A History of the English Bible as Literature (Cambridge, 2000). Abridged edition of Norton's two-volume (and far mor expensive...) study.
James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study of English Political Culture, 1815-1867 (Cambridge, 1993). Democratization of English politics at mid-century.
Randall Craig, Promising Language: Betrothal in Victorian Law and Fiction (SUNY, 2003). The multiple meanings of promises in Victorian culture.
Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connexion Between Science and Revealed Religion (Murphy & Co., 1852). First volume of lectures by Wiseman, who often lectured on the sciences more generally.
John D. Barbour, Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith (Virginia, 1994). The rhetoric of deconversion from the beginnings of Christianity to the present day.
Peter Lake and Michael C. Questier, The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (Yale, 2002). Massive study of the religious pamphlet wars in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.
J. G. Farrell, Troubles (NYRB, 2002). Third volume of Farrell's so-called "Empire Trilogy," set in post-WWI Ireland.
John Haddon Leith, Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine, from the Bible to the Present (John Knox, 1983). Collects and annotates the creeds of the various Christian dominations.
Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge, 1997). Role of history in shaping modern gay identities.

2003-09-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow's teaching schedule features the somewhat odd combination of John Keats and Anne Bradstreet. The Keats in question is "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which I hope my students will enjoy rather more than they did "The Eve of St. Agnes." (A poem which I happen to like quite a bit.) There are a number of paintings based on "The Eve of St. Agnes"; see, for example, those by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Elizabeth Siddal.

In the meantime, since the deadline for my companion articles is fast approaching, I've found myself scribbling a bit about folks normally outside my purview: Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pisan. Lucy Aikin is a bit closer to home, needless to say--although I'm writing about the later Memoirs (Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I) and not the better-known Epistles on Women.

2003-09-08T16:19:00.000-07:00

(No, I didn't change my template for aesthetic reasons. Blogger just sort of...um...waved its wand and made my sidebar disappear. Very exciting, that.)

The book went off to England today, minus its index, which can't be finalized until the printers are done looking over the text. Tomorrow, I celebrate the (temporary) absence of the MS by visiting the Finger Lakes region with one of my colleagues.

2003-09-07T12:23:00.000-07:00

I hate proofreading my own work. All these teensy-weensy errors in formatting, or in author/editor attributions ("um, wait, I've got the wrong editor here..."), or in goodness-knows-what. But the book will be mailed to the UK tomorrow. *puts foot down*

Meanwhile, between proofreading, printing, and printing some more, I finally got fed up with looking at books on my living room floor--a hint to cheapskates: the combination of a Sauder pressed wood bookcase + ice damming=kaput bookcase--and went to Raymour & Flanigan for two Thornton Oak 84" bookcases. Besides being attractive bookcases, they should also temporarily ameliorate the "oh no, I'm out of space again" problem. (You'd think 24+ bookcases for a single person would be enough. But if you think that, you clearly haven't met me!)

2003-09-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

My graduate seminar spent last night discussing Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), which, they all agreed, was one of the strangest novels they had ever read. Indeed, as Instapundit might say. I'm much more of a Jane Eyre person myself--that's next week's assignment--but there's no denying that Wuthering Heights is a potent brew of Byronic Romanticism, the Gothic, and a rather offbeat anti-Calvinist theology. (On post-Romantic Byronism, see, for example, Andrew Elfenbein and the collection edited by Frances Wilson.) Emily wrote genuinely striking poetry as well; see, for example, her work in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846). (Ramblings of a Philosophe features some critical essays and lectures on the work of both Emily and Anne, with an emphasis on the poetry.) For a good, albeit brief, biographical introduction to Emily's work, see Steven Vine's essay at the Literary Encyclopedia. The Brontë Sisters Web provides a number of useful links to Emily's poetry and fiction (although several were dead). To see some title pages, try this exhibit at the University of Virginia. And don't forget to drop in for a visit at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, or maybe take a trip to the Brontë Birthplace in Thornton.

2003-09-03T09:08:00.000-07:00

I confess to being somewhat baffled by this article in the NYT (reg. req.). Once I got beyond the initial nods of agreement--no, it won't kill senior faculty to teach freshmen; yes, good teaching should be rewarded--I found myself lost in a miasma of vague promises and claims. To begin with, the idea of a "teaching faculty," while problematic*, might be a good one if the teaching faculty were treated on an even keel with the research faculty. I.e.: sabbaticals, grants, and release time for course development; tenure and promotion based on demonstrated teaching ability; and so forth. But where's the even keel in keeping the teaching faculty off the tenure track? This paragraph didn't improve matters: "But in an academic culture where tenure is the grand prize, Dr. Sexton is struggling with how to accord them status. He said he would find other ways to reward and honor them and assure them of academic freedom." What does that mean? I can see someone exchanging tenure for $$$, but what's being described here really seems to be a stepped-up adjuncting system. Even a teaching "star" is an adjunct when hired on a temporary contract without any hope of obtaining "security of employment" (as administrators normally call tenure for lecturers). Substituting contract faculty for part-timers is a good idea, but don't we already call such faculty "lecturers" or "visiting professors"? It doesn't help that the administration and the adjunct union seem to, ah, differ so strongly in their accounts of who's doing what.

*Thus: do teaching faculty have a heavier courseload? What happens to the teaching professor who discovers a desperate urge to write a monograph on Marivaux? Who assesses their work? How do you assess their work? Can you switch tracks? How does a teaching professor maintain his or her status within the department?

2003-08-31T15:05:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that my MS will be off to the publisher next week. After all, I came up with the concept for the original doctoral dissertation back in '95; finished the dissertation in '97; and have been plugging away at the revisions off and on since '98. (Still, the final "push" to finish didn't happen until 2001.) This weekend has been all about last-minute house-cleaning: catching typos in the bibliography, all 24 pages of it; trying to shorten some of my trademark overstuffed footnotes; switching passive voice into active... Between bouts at the computer, I've been filing photocopies. When I work, I wind up with photocopies spilling out over my home office floor in graceless profusion--rather like a paper swamp. But now that I've filed most of the book-related paperwork, the floor has come into view for the first time in about a year or so. There's something vaguely melancholy about that.

2003-08-30T12:17:00.000-07:00

For one of the short pieces I'm working on, I've had to read up a bit on medieval hagiography. There a number of online hagiography sites, including the saints' lives page at the Internet Medieval Sourcebook; the Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database (Byzantine); and David Woods' Military Martyrs. Thomas Heads' page, hosted at ORB, features a number of important bibliographies and text links. For All the Saints lists saints in alphabetical order, but unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since 1999; here's another list from the Catholic Information Network. To find secondary sources on women and hagiography, try Feminae. The Bollandists, a Jesuit order, have been pursuing the critical study of hagiography since the seventeenth century; since their criticism extends to determining which saints are real and which spurious, they haven't always been popular.

2003-08-29T16:53:00.000-07:00

Two short articles to finish + paperwork + new school year = blog, what blog?

Anyway. This week's acquisitions:

Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770 (Yale, 2003). The formation of Irish Protestant culture, both elite and plebeian, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Robert Louis Brannan, ed., Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens: His Production of "The Frozen Deep" (Cornell, 1966). An edition of the play about the Franklin expedition, written by Wilkie Collins and revised by Charles Dickens.

2003-08-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

I was surprised at how closely Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock followed Joan Lindsay's original novel (1967): not only does Weir hew to Lindsay's plot, but he also appropriates almost all of the imagery and symbolism. Weir pares down some of the peripheral details--the death of Miss Lumley, the afterlife of Minnie and Tom--but without affecting the plot in any significant fashion. Other things are a bit clearer in the novel than they are in the film, like Mrs. Appleyard's probable background (rather dubious) and Edith's "red cloud" (a, well, red herring; pay close attention in the novel and you'll realize what it is). Weir's most significant alteration comes at the end, when he decides not to represent Mrs. Appleyard's death on Hanging Rock.

This weekend's other adventure in film was Seabiscuit. I quite enjoyed Laura Hillenbrand's book--and, as I mentioned in the previous incarnation of this blog, as a child I loved horse racing. (Is there a horse out there cooler than John Henry? OK, there probably isn't a horse out there who's nastier, either, but that's part of the, er, charm.) In any event, this is one of those films that raises questions about the relationship between fiction and history--less because of the content than because of the plot structure. For obvious reasons, the film has to eliminate much of the book's detail: we don't see Charles Howard's other son, his other star horse, Red Pollard's wife, George Woolf's death, and so forth. The politics were a little too schematic for my taste. It's scruffy West Coast migrant "new blood" vs. elitist East Coast bluebloods, with the former representing the American future (Howard's favorite word) and the latter representing the faux European old guard. Still, it probably isn't possible to do that sort of thing subtly when you only have 2 1/2 hours or so. Qua film, it takes too long to get going, with all the action coming in the second half; the racing scenes are done very well indeed, and real-life champion jockey Gary Stevens performs nicely as "the Iceman," Woolf. Oddly enough, the only character here to emerge without much personality is the horse. (Oddly, because--like John Henry--Seabiscuit could be a handful.)

What struck me was the decision to end the film with Seabiscuit's comeback victory in the Santa Anita Handicap. The filmmakers very much want to emphasize the "victory of the common man" theme: hence the rags-to-riches businessman, the scrappy half-blind jockey, the displaced cowboy, and, of course, the crooked-legged horse. In the concluding voiceover, Pollard muses on how "we fixed each other." Yet the book's reading of their "plot" yields something far more ambivalent. After that final race, Seabiscuit was retired and proved unsuccessful at stud (his foals had his rotten conformation but little of his talent); Howard, who genuinely loved this horse, kept Seabiscuit on as a cow pony (!) until he suddenly died of a heart attack at age 14. Pollard was a successful jockey only when riding Seabiscuit, and slipped back into poverty after a series of riding accidents. And while the trainer, Tom Smith, did enjoy a respectable career for some years afterwards, he went downhill after a doping accusation and eventually ended up back where he started. In other words, it's accurate up to a point to say that this story embodies all the key elements of the American dream, but what the film omits is just how fragile that dream can be. So did the filmmakers tell "the truth" by ending at the Santa Anita Handicap--the point just before the dream fell apart--or not?

2003-08-22T11:38:00.000-07:00

This week's acquisitions:

Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (Yale, 2000). The "first major collective study of the artists, architects, patrons, and friends of the Holland Park Circle--G. F. Watts, Frederic Leighton, Valentine Prinsep, and others--whose influence extended beyond the art world to English society itself." For Leighton, see here.
Patricia Duncker, The Doctor: A Novel (Ecco, 2000). Originally published in the UK as James Miranda Barry. Based on a true story about a woman who managed to have a successful medical career by pretending to be a man.
Arabella Edge, The Company: Portrait of a Murderer (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Historical novel about the grim doings behind a 17th c. shipwreck.
John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford, 2003). The effect of new media on the representation of the monarchy.
Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock (Vintage, 1998). Reprint of this fascinating tale, set in Australia right at the turn of the twentieth century. The basis, of course, for Peter Weir's film (which I'm teaching this semester).

2003-08-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

The new school year begins on Monday. Yikes! Presumably now would be a good time to finish posting my syllabi to the campus server.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on my article. I've now dispatched two books by Alison Plowden, with a few more by various other women writers waiting in the wings. Speaking as a Victorianist, this is perhaps a bit more time than I expected to spend reading up on Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, or Anne Boleyn--but then again, you can never read too many books, can you?

2003-08-18T18:12:00.000-07:00

The purpose of a printer is, one presumes, to print. However, the makers of the printer which came with my computer--the name of said company shall remain anonymous--apparently believe that the printer is a purely aesthetic object. Four months ago, I exhausted my black ink cartridge and went online to buy replacements. One does, after all, operate on the logical presumption that such things exist. I, however, was rapidly disabused of my presumption: no cartridges were available from the company's site or, indeed, anywhere else. Hmm. Next stop: the village's printer store, where the owner confirmed that not only were there no cartridges available, but also that there were no generics available either. The store's owner then called the supplier every day for the next two months or so. Still no cartridges. Meanwhile, I began to feel, shall we say, a certain frustration. At present, the scholarly community expects that articles and suchlike will be printed in black ink. Now, I suppose that there may be a case for articles printed in magenta, say, or maybe cyan. I'm sure that somewhere out there lurks an editor who would be thrilled to see someone engaging in such transgressive behavior; one could always frame it as a strike against current hegemonic models of professional self-construction. Or something. Nevertheless, the time for such revolutionary behavior is probably not yet at hand. Being equipped with limited reserves of patience (and also desiring to print out my book), I finally gave up on the cartridges and the printer, and am now the very proud possessor of a reconditioned laser printer. And I must say that its output is much prettier than that of the "new" inkjet--even if the printer itself is less aesthetically pleasing.

Meanwhile, my university's servers appear to be fried--web access was out from Friday until late this afternoon, and we still can't get our e-mail. (The techs have been upgrading the servers, but the upgrade seems to have taken a wrong turn.) And my office computer has been shrieking every time I turn it on, which can't possibly be optimal behavior. At least I don't have a Blaster worm. Yet. (I did download the patch.)

Retreating to the safer world of hard copy, I'm now juggling the reading for three different things: the "companion" essay I'm writing; the new school year (which begins next week; I've revised all my courses, so there's some rereading to do); and a book review for Choice. So I read Carolly Erickson's Mistress Anne (Anne Boleyn) yesterday and Alison Plowden's Young Elizabeth today, with interspersed dives into the book I'm reviewing. I did lighten things up a bit by reading through Gardner Dozois' newest annual, which among other things had a rather nice update of the Frankenstein legend by Greg Egan.

2003-08-16T14:59:00.000-07:00

I was reading Elizabeth Benger's Memoirs of the Life of Anne Boleyn, Queen of Henry VIII for the "companion" article I'm currently writing. Benger is one of those murky yet potentially interesting figures who lurk in the margins of nineteenth-century literary history. An early nineteenth-century Methodist, Benger practices the kind of affective historiography outlined by Greg Kucich: her work promotes sentimental identification with the subject while it emphasizes loss and decay. Benger's life of Elizabeth Hamilton is in print (but, as is usual for Thoemmes, is priced well out of the reach of all but libraries or the exceedingly well-heeled academic).

On a train of thought tangential to Anne Boleyn, I came across an interesting article in the Guardian on Hans Holbein, inspired by this exhibition. There's a good collection of Holbein images here--my favorite being the portrait of Christina of Denmark; see also the Hans Holbein Dance of Death.

2003-08-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

This week's acquisitions (most of the acquiring in question took place in London, but the books only arrived this week):

David Daniell, The Bible in English (Yale, 2003). Examines the history of Biblical translation into English from the fourth century to the present day.
G. E. Bentley, Jr., A Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Yale, 2003). Substantial new biography of a poet who has always a proved a tough biographical nut to crack.
Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in Britain, 1660-1850 (Yale, 2001). Social history of the fate (often unpleasant) of unmarried women; one of the late Hill's last works.
Richard Ollard, The Image of the King: Charles I and Charles II (Phoenix, 2001). Reprint of Ollard's study of how Charles I and II manipulated their public images through official portraiture and other artistic methods. There are a number of other famous studies along this line, including Roy Strong's The Cult of Elizabeth and Frances Yates' Astraea.
Richard Price, British Society 1680-1880: Dynamism, Containment, and Change (Cambridge, 1999). Argues that "modern" Britain dates back to the late seventeenth century.
Lucasta Miller, The Bronte Myth (Cape, 2001). Critical analysis of the Bronte biography industry since its beginnings.
Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon's Sermons, 5 vols. (Baker, 1999). Facsimile reprint of the 1883 edition of the famed (and very prolific) Baptist preacher's sermons. A number of Spurgeon's works are available via the Spurgeon Archive.

2003-08-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

Straying even further from "things Victorian," although not academic, I've been looking at a number of sites devoted to Dante's Inferno--a poem for which I developed quite a passion when I was in high school. Probably the most important site right now is Digital Dante at Columbia University, which includes e-texts, secondary sources, images, and links. Renaissance Dante in Print chronicles nearly two centuries of Dante editions, and includes several illustrations of Hell. For those fluent in Italian, The World of Dante includes a complete electronic transcription, illustrations, and a textual "map" of Hell. If you're interested more specifically in illustrations of Hell, this site includes works by Blake, Botticelli, and Dore; more images are linked via ORB. And if you're wondering where you belong in Hell, you can always take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test.

2003-08-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

Among the many items in Sir John Soane's collection: complete sets of William Hogarth's The Election and A Rake's Progress. While best known today as a satirist, Hogarth was also an influential figure in the history of British aesthetic philosophy; see his Analysis of Beauty (1753). Although we now remember Hogarth mainly for the engravings, he was also a prolific painter in oils; see here for a fairly large collection of images, including such famous paintings as The Roast Beef of Old England. There's an enormous set of Hogarth prints (with critical commentary) at Haley and Steele. Northwestern University hosts a good website on William Hogarth and 18th-Century Print Culture, which features a number of brief practical guides to the interpretation of Hogarth's work. William Hogarth's Realm offers criticism, biographical information, images, and the author's M.A. thesis. For bibliography and additional links, try Hogarth: The Site for Research on William Hogarth.

On a non-academic note, I picked up three of Stephen Booth's novels about DC Ben Cooper and DS Diane Fry while in England. They're very much British Grim, with detectives suffering from deep psychological problems of one sort or another, but still well-written and well-plotted. The running conflict between the two detectives is a bit forced, in Fanny Burney-esque style; like Burney's novels, the books would get a lot shorter if the main characters would just say what's actually on their minds. Nevertheless, enjoyable (or is that the right adjective?) summer reading.

2003-08-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

Back again; now I've got work to do. In any event, the conference went well, despite the experience of a heat wave without air conditioning (I thought people were going to scream "She's melting! she's melting!" while I presented my paper). Among previously unchronicled activities, I visited some of the galleries at Tate Britain and the wonderfully cluttered (albeit designedly so) Sir John Soane's Museum. Another outing took me to the Victoria and Albert Museum, then across the street to the Natural History Museum. (The latter was a bit of a nostalgia trip: I wanted to see if the human biology exhibit had changed since I first saw it as a child in 1976--around the time it was first installed. It's mostly still the same, although in parts a bit more high tech.) For my 32nd birthday--woo hoo!--I saw Chicago, but only after purchasing a first edition of Reginald Hill's Ruling Passion (1973).

2003-07-31T09:59:00.000-07:00

I started off the day at one of my favorite places in London, Westminster Abbey, then took in the "London 1753" exhibit at the British Museum. (I also bought a book while I was there, although I nearly fainted at the shipping charge.) After that, I wound up being on the Tube for a while, exploring here and there, before finishing off the day by picking up my train tickets to get to the conference.

2003-07-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

In case you're wondering where on earth the blog went: let's just say we had a wee bit of difficulty with my account. So here we go again. The links will be reposted shortly after I get back from the UK. (Why, yes, I'm in the UK. No, I haven't bought a lot of books--too many booksellers refuse to ship to the US.)