I have a new e-book available for sale, Mood Detroit. Three strong mini-novels. Their subject is artists, struggle, and love. Tales from a permanent recession. Ridiculously affordable. Kindle or Nook. Buy it now.
Here’s a very interesting call for papers from Hsu-Ming Teo, via PopCAANZ
I’m putting together an edited book on the theme of romantic love in popular culture. The aim of the book is to understand how Australians’ beliefs, ideals, and practices of romantic love have changed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — how we have written and spoken about being in love or falling out of love, and how these issues are related to dating, courtship, and long-term commitments such as cohabitation and marriage. This book asks: what kinds of popular cultural practices have facilitated or reflected ideas of romantic love to Australians?Questions to be explored include (but are not limited to):
1. How has love been represented in:
• the media
• film
• television
• music
• popular literature
• graphic novels, comics, etc.
• What are the classic Australian love stories, and why?
2. How have dating and courtship changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
3. How have consumerism and advertising affected the idea and/or practice of romantic love?
4. How does popular culture facilitate the practice of romantic love?
• e.g. what kinds of ideas/beliefs/practices have developed around food and love?
• Is there a role for clothing/fashion in the practice or marketing of romantic love? etc.
5. Do developments in gender roles, multiculturalism, the sexualisation of popular culture, age, etc. affect ideas of romantic love?
The book will be an accessibly written trade book aimed at a non-specialist audience which I hope will be launched on Valentine’s Day 2013.
Deadlines are as follows:
• Abstract: 26 September 2011
• Final chapter (5-8000 words): 4 June 2012
Conferences: If people are interested and we can get enough papers together, I will organize panel sessions at:
• PopCAANZ conference 2012, Melbourne – dates tba
• PCA/ACA conference, Boston, 11-14 April 2012
• International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, 27-29 September 2011 [I think this may in fact refer to the 2012 IASPR conference]
If you are interested in submitting an abstract on any aspect of the popular culture of romantic love in Australia, can you please let me know so that I don’t go chasing other people for book chapters on that topic. Please email me as soon as possible at: hsuming.teo@mq.edu.au
With best wishes,
Dr Hsu-Ming Teo
The image came from Wikimedia Commons and was created by Andreyyshore.
After Odysseus, famed warrior and inventor of the Trojan Horse (the original wooden one, not the one you can pick up from questionable internet sites), left behind the Island of the Lotus-Eaters, he sails on to a far more dangerous location: the Island of the Cyclops.
Cyclopses.
Cyclopes.
Whatever. The island where a bunch of one-eyed cannibalistic giants live.
Unfortunately for Odysseus and his men, they don’t realize that they’ve staggered out of a naval adventure movie and into a horror flick. All they know is that they arrive on shore, starving and desperate for shelter, and find a giant cave stocked with cheese, and only a complete monster would object to starving, desperate, lost travellers eating. Right?
They’re in for a shock when Polyphemus returns. He not only objects, he turns around and eats two of Odysseus’ crew members (thus proving that the Red Shirt trope is older than dirt). Odysseus objects to this, claiming that it is wrong to eat one’s guests. Or anyone, for that matter. Polyphemus responds that since Odysseus is his guest, he will give him the gift of eating him last.
The horror of this scene comes from not one but two strong taboos being broken. The first and obvious is the Cyclops’ cannibalism. But the ancient audience would have been at least as disturbed by the violation of the laws of hospitality. It’s hard for us, in an age of hotels, motels, and homeaway.com, to understand just how deeply ingrained the relationship between a host and a guest was in the ancient world. As a parallel, in the Illiad, two characters meet on opposing sides of the battlefield and discover that their grandfathers had been guest and host once. Rather than remarking that it was a tragedy that they would have to kill each other, they traded armor so that they would never run the risk of killing each other by mistake. In order to understand the revulsion Homer’s audience would feel at the suggestion of a host EATING one of his guests, we’d have to reach for an analogy like our own reaction to pedophilia. It was that strong a taboo.
So we know right away that Polyphemus is a monster. Like all great monsters, he shows us what we are as supposedly civilized people by being what we are not. The Cyclopes, Homer tells us, don’t eat bread (that is, they don’t have agriculture), don’t live together in communities, don’t have laws, don’t offer sacrifices to the gods, and, clearly, don’t mind a meal of human flesh now and then.
What makes this episode great story-telling (and popular with High School teachers everywhere) is that it also perfectly demonstrates what kind of man, and what kind of hero, Odysseus is. Trapped in a cave with a giant with a hankering for long pork, he resorts to his wiles. He tricks Polyphemus (who has never had a drink before) into getting so drunk that he passes out, then gouges out his eye with a telephone pole.
Why not just kill him outright? Here’s the trick: Polyphemus keeps his cave locked with a giant boulder so large that none of the humans can move it. But he lets the sheep (who sleep in the cave with him at night) out every morning to pasture. So Odysseus and his men strap themselves underneath the sheep and ride out to safety.
Odysseus is a different kind of hero: he’s fearsome on the battlefield but his primary strength is his cunning. He’s so wily, in fact, that he attracts the attention of the goddess Athena, the patron of wisdom and warfare.
But he’s also his own worst enemy. His arrogance, his curiosity, and his inherent smart-assery prove time and again to be his (and his men’s) undoing. In the case of his encounter with the Cyclops, he waits until he is out of Polyphemus’ reach before taunting him. The Cyclops then calls down the wrath of his father, the god Poseidon.
Since the only way Odysseus can get home is by sea, this is particularly bad luck.
In this quality, Odysseus is the forerunner of the classic rogue. Han Solo, Harry Dresden, Mal Reynolds: tricksters all, and Homer’s hero is one of their granddaddies.
Next up: Odysseus messes with the weather and learns that, like the Cyclops, he should have slept with one eye open. (Can I get a rim shot? Anyone? Is this thing on?)
FIRST RELEASE
My new ebook, Ten Pop Stories, is available first and exclusively for the moment on Nook at
I’m offering it at an introductory low price. This may be the best value in literature. The collection contains some of my best pop stories along with several new ones. It will soon enough be available at other outlets– but get it now ahead of the crowd!
We are pleased
to announce the second part of an eight-part electronic edition of the Collected Letters of Robert Southey. Part Two is edited by Lynda Pratt and Ian Packer.
Robert Southey, as many of our readers know, was one of the best-known, controversial and innovative writers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Based upon extensive new archival research, this Collected edition makes available for the first time all his surviving letters, freshly edited, annotated and introduced.
Part One covers 1791-1797, turbulent years which saw the forging of Southey’s career and reputation, his involvement in radical politics, and the beginning of his friendships with Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Part Two, which covers 1798-1803, includes his public and private responses to Lyrical Ballads (1798); his reaction to the rise of Napoleon and the continuing conflict between Britain and revolutionary France; his second and final visit to Portugal and the resultant hardening of his anti-Catholicism; his unhappy stint as a secretary to the Irish Chancellor Isaac Corry, and his emotional bludgeoning by the deaths in relentless succession between 1801-1803 of three Margarets, his cousin, mother and first child. Part Two comprises 596 letters, of which 199 are published for the first time, and 107 are published in full for the first time. In addition, 5 letters that appeared pseudonymously in the Monthly Magazine are here newly attributed to Southey.
I’ve been thinking over the past few days about last week’s post on William Blake and fantasy. I’ve come to realise that post is actually just the start of a much larger project.
I mentioned last week that I agreed with John Clute’s argument that the mid-eighteenth century was the era when fantastika — sf, fantasy, and horror — came into being. I’ll go further. I think the era that followed, the Romantic era of English literature, represented the dawn of fantasy as we know it; and that the major writers of that time pioneered approaches to fantasy, and elements of fantasy fiction, that are still in use today. I’ve realised now that I want to write about this general subject: Romanticism as the start of modern fantasy. But the more I thought about it, the more different connections I found between fantasy and Romanticism. So many, in fact, that I’ve also realised that there’s no way I can cover them all in one post.
I therefore intend to explore those connections in a series of upcoming essays. It’ll be an irregular series, I expect, interspersed with posts about more contemporary elements of fantasy as well. I anticipate it being wide-ranging. There are a lot of different aspects to Romanticism, and it’s a topic and a time that’s endlessly fascinating to me.
I want to write posts about each of the other five major English poets of the time; and may yet end up revisiting Blake. I want to write a post about gothic novels. I want to write about the politics of the time, and how they played into Romantic thought and ideology, and perhaps glance at how that brew of revolution and nationalism has played out since. I want to talk about the general cultural trends of the time — music, art, and the drama. I want to write about the more minor writers of the era, about magazines and essayists and the development of popular culture. I want to write about storm and stress; about folklore, fairy tales, fraudulent epics, and Faustus; about magic, and Mont Blanc, and myth. I want to write about some of the most powerful writing in the English language; about a time, as it was said, when great spirits on Earth were sojourning.
I also want to be clear that I’m writing about today’s fantasy, or about something indivisible from it. That is specifically the point I want to make, or at least the intuition that I hope to prove; that Romanticism and contemporary fantasy are essentially the same thing, expressions of the same impulse. Romanticism was the first attempt to explore the subjects and themes we now find in fantasy — the first consciousness of fantasy as fantasy, of the fantastic story as bearing a special relationship to the real world.
William Wordsworth wrote about nature — about the pre-industrial landscape, and specifically about the sublime in nature — in a way that resonates with later fantasy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in addition to writing fantasy in verse, wrote criticism which attempted to analyse the impulse to fantasy, and the way it worked on the reader’s mind; he was the first critic of fantasy fiction. George Gordon, Lord Byron, became the inspiration for the figure of the aristocratic vampire; in his life and work, villainy is consciously fantastic. Percy Shelley, his friend and in many ways opposite, wrote political fantasies influenced by the gothic, showing how to unite a radical sensibility with fantasy. And John Keats wrote of aesthetic otherworlds, drawing inspiration from myth and folktale to depict “realms of gold” clothed in sensuous language — a uniting of concrete style and unreal content that has to be considered directly relevant to fantasy writing.
It is of course true that most or all of these writers have inspired contemporary writers by their life and work. Off the top of my head, you can find Coleridge in Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Shelley and Byron and Keats in Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard, Byron again in John Crowley’s Lord Byron’s Novel, Keats in Dan Simmons’ magnificent Hyperion sequence. But I’m less interested in the relevance of their work to specific modern creators than I am in the general meaning of their accomplishments. I think they, and other writers of their time, were beginning the literature of the fantastic as a conscious tradition, and interrogating fantasy as a form to see what it could do. My suspicion is that there are lessons in their work about fantasy still to be learned.
When I wrote about the development of heroic fantasy, and identified Sara Coleridge as the first heroic fantasy writer, I mentioned that to me part of the importance of this attribution was that it seemed to insist on the direct link between modern fantasy and the Romantics; seemed to definitively extend the fantasy tradition to those writers. What I want to do now is go further, and write about what that means, and how those writers are fantasists.
So, what is Romanticism, then? This is a difficult question. It’s a term that was applied after the fact to the writing and thought of an era in Western Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth; it has specific reference to art and literature, but also describes the politics and general mentality of the time. You’d expect, then, that there would be some kind of common thread among the great writers and thinkers of the era. But this is not really the case. They are, fundamentally, individuals; idiosyncratic. You can find connections between almost any two writers, maybe among three, but beyond that you’ll probably start finding more contradictions than coherencies.
It is broadly true that Romanticism was a reaction against the neoclassical culture of the earlier eighteenth century; against the Age of Reason. But that reaction took many forms. You might think of the Romantics as points along a circle drawn around the Age of Reason. All of them have their backs turned to the inside of the circle, facing away from Reason, but this also means that they’re all looking outward in different directions — if, sometimes, with overlapping fields of vision.
C.S. Lewis once identified seven different meanings ascribed to the word “romantic” — quite apart from ‘having to do with love.’ It may be worth talking about Romanticism as a collection of different, though sometimes related, characteristics. Among them, borrowing in part from Lewis, one might isolate: 1) A fascination with writing that rejected precedent and the critical precepts of the Age of Reason; especially older, medieval, writing (The word ‘Romanticism’ comes from this meaning, an interest in the medieval romances — adventure stories and Arthurian tales); 2) a fascination with the common folk of a nation, particularly the popular stories and songs of the peasants; 3) an interest in the sublime, in the shocking and overwhelming, in awe and horror; 4) an interest in the aberrant, the unusual, especially unusual states of mind; 5) an interest in the self, in the personality of the individual — especially of the individual artist; 6) an interest in revolution, in the overturning of the established order; 7) a fascination with nature and depictions of nature; 8 ) an interest in the aesthetic, and in the creative power of the artist.
I’d say in addition to the above that Romanticism and Romantic literature examined what we now call the unconscious. It was, in fact, Coleridge who introduced the word “unconscious” into English. Dreams, repressions, and the irrational part of the psyche were common themes for Romantic writers. Obviously that’s immediately important for fantasy. But one can go further, and say that the current understanding of the human mind, with reason dwarfed by the unconscious, by matter repressed and unacknowledged, was born in the Romantic era. Blake in particular seems to directly prefigure Freud.
But if Romanticism frequently seems almost disturbingly modern, it’s also notable for its contrasts with other current artistic trends. Specifically, there’s a strong interest today in reaching beyond the self, beyond one’s own awareness of the world, to find out about the different experiences of different people, particularly people of a different culture or background. Although it was in fact during the Romantic era that the idea of ‘otherness’ was first enunciated, Romanticism by and large is uninterested in this approach. Romanticism is a literature of the self; it is, one might say, the record of the exploration and discovery of the self, the uncovering of the hidden parts of one’s own psyche. The other exists in order to define the self; and so Romantic writing is filled with doubles and doppelgangers, counterparts and reflections.
Indeed, if Romanticism is uninterested in the other, it may be because the self was only just coming into being. On a social level, many nations were taking on their contemporary forms, and, in doing so, developing Romantic myths of their pasts and their fundamental nature — Romanticism, in this sense, has to do with nationalism. But on an individual level, I think a more important level, Romanticism probed deeper into previously-unacknowledged levels of the psyche in order to find hidden truths. To redefine the human, and insist on the value of human art.
The Romantic writer or artist took on the role of an inspired creator; a prophet. The artist, before this, was a craftsman. After Romanticism, the artist was a visionary. At its best, this was a powerful statement of the role of the artist and of art, an insistence on the validity of that art and of the aesthetic experience. Romanticism established a kind of holiness in poetry, affirming the meaning of art. You could say that the sense of the divine, to some extent displaced from traditional religion by the advent of Reason, found a new home in art.
I think again there’s relevance here for fantasy. Fantasy fiction insists on its difference from everyday life, from the world as we regularly experience it. That is what it means to be fantastic: to be in opposition to reality as it’s commonly understood. The fantasy story insists on its status as a thing apart from life and mimesis of that life; insists on its existence as a fiction, as an artificial construction, as a product of language. And it insists implicitly that it has value quite aside from its immediate application to reality — apart from whatever actual information it gives us, apart from whatever obvious moral it may or may not have. The fantasy insists on the importance of a story as a story. To me, that is an insistence on the value of art. And it is an inherently Romantic stance.
Is Romanticism, is the Romantic era, directly relevant to today’s world? As with most eras, in some ways yes and in some ways no. But then, if you as a writer of a given time write about any other period, you will make it relevant to your own time, because you will find in it those elements that matter to you. I’m hoping to establish that we can find in Romanticism elements that matter to fantasy, to the writing of our own era.
I will readily admit that this is a period that speaks to me, in the sense that the literature of Romanticism has seemed particularly powerful to me, particularly critical, since I first read it twenty years ago. If I as a Canadian nevertheless have some trepidation in writing about European history, and specifically English history; about trying to define the literature and experiences of a culture connected with, but different from, my own — still, I speak and write English, and to understand that heritage I must understand the language and history of England. This is part of that process. It’s a process that’s important to me because the literature of this time is important to me, in its accomplishment and its themes. And I think trying to articulate the importance I find in Romanticism means trying to articulate its importance to the genre of writing that appeals to me both as writer and reader.
My argument, my intuition, is that Romanticism is where fantasy, as such, got its start. It is an argument I look forward to articulating over the course of the posts to come.
A wrap-up of features you may have missed this past week at Largehearted Boy:
52 Books, 52 Weeks Book Reviews (my weekly short book review)
Shannon Wheeler’s comics collection Too Much Coffee Man Omnibus
Book Notes (authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their book)
Alex Shakar for his novel Luminarium
Cathy Stonehouse for her short story collection Something About the Animal
Evan Mandery for his novel Q
Henry Sutton for his novel Get Me Out of Here
Matthew Norman for his novel Domestic Violets
Myla Goldberg for her novel The False Friend
Weekly new book recommendations:
Atomic Books Comics Preview (recommended new comics and graphic novels)
Largehearted Word (recommended new books)
New Music recommendations:
Try It Before You Buy It (full album streams and mp3s from this week’s music releases)
The Week’s Interesting Music Releases
New DVD recommendations:
The Week’s Interesting DVD Releases
And of course, the daily music and news posts:
Daily Downloads (10 free and legal mp3 downloads every day, plus links to free live recordings online)
Shorties (news & links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)
also at Largehearted Boy:
52 Books, 52 Weeks
Antiheroines
Atomic Books Comics Preview
Book Notes
Book Reviews
Contests / Giveaways
Daily Downloads
Largehearted Word
Lists
music & DVD release lists
musician/author Interviews
Note Books
Soundtracked
Try It Before You Buy It
Why Obama
Laura Vivanco recently posted on the differences between the UK and Australian covers of Maisey Yate’s The Highest Price to Pay, suggesting that it is the first Mills & Boon ‘Modern Romance’ title to feature a black protagonist on the cover. Of course, while not of African-Caribbean descent, non-white heroes have long been depicted on ‘Modern Romance’ covers in the figure of the sheikh. Yet the racial politics of sheikh romance covers are not straightforward either. The erotic fetishising of contrasting skin colour is a well-documented trope in both modern and older sheikh romances and is commonly used in ‘Modern Romance’ titles:
The dark bronze of his body was in contrast to her own paler skin and as he lay down beside her she was fascinated by the sight of his large long-fingered hand splaying possessively across her body. Who’d have thought anything so simple could be so erotic? (West, For the Sheikh’s Pleasure, 104)
Jessica Taylor has written that sheikh romances are one of the few occasions when the colour line is broken in North American category romance (1036). Hsu-Ming Teo observed that the covers of sheikh romances in the 1990s (so before the start of the Mills & Boon ‘Modern Romance’ series in August 2000) emphasised and celebrated racial difference as symbolised through skin tone (250), which seems to correlate with the eroticisation of contrasting skin colour in sheikh romances. Teo’s observations are initially corroborated by Juliet Flesch’s findings that the covers of sheikh romances published in the late 1980s and early 1990s emphasise a contrast between a blonde heroine and a dark hero.
However, Flesch goes on to observe that the covers of later sheikh novels published in the 1990s by the same author reveal less contrast between hero and heroine (214-215). Whilst both Teo and Flesch research novels published in the 1990s, my analysis of novels published from 2000-2009 reveals a surprising shift which correlates with Flesch’s conclusions about later sheikh novels. On the covers of some sheikh titles published in Mills & Boon’s ‘Modern Romance’ series over the past ten years, sheikh heroes have been whitened and a suggestive contrast has arisen between the representation of heroes in the text, where contrasting skin colour is eroticised, and the covers, where the contrast in skin colour is reduced and, in some cases, completely elided. Of the 57 sheikh romances published in the ‘Modern Romance’ series, only six appear to emphasise a contrast in skin colour on the cover (see for example The Desert Sheikh’s Captive Wife and Traded to the Sheikh). The six novels which emphasise racial difference seem to be clustered in the two-year period from 2006-2008: Emma Darcy’s Traded to the Sheikh (2006); Sandra Marton’s The Desert Virgin (2006); Jane Porter’s The Sheikh’s Disobedient Bride (2006); Sharon Kendrick’s The Sheikh’s English Bride (2007); Lynne Graham’s The Desert Sheikh’s Captive Wife (2007); and The Sheikh’s Convenient Virgin by Trish Morey (2008).
Eighteen covers remove the couple from the cover all together, substituting a desert landscape, which seemed to be the preferred format until around 2005 (see The Arabian Mistress);
and nine covers have a slight, discernable difference, but which is not the main focus of the cover (see The Sheikh’s Unwilling Wife).
There seems to be no correlation between the skin colour of the sheikh hero on the cover and in the text. For example, Annie West’s The Sheikh’s Ransomed Bride describes how the heroine’s ‘breath stopped at the sight of him there, one large, tanned hand on her pale skin’ (147), yet the cover indicates no difference in skin colour between hero and heroine. In the text, their contrasting skin colour is eroticised, but on the covers, the sheikh’s ability to assimilate into (white) western culture is more prominent. This seems to reveal a paradox within these romances: a desire for difference, but an insistence on sameness.
This paradox is of course reflected in the sheikh hero’s hybridity, he has often been educated in the West, and may have Western (European, North American or Australian) parentage. Marketing a romance novel with a Middle Eastern hero at a time of political instability and western military engagement in the Middle East and North Africa could be seen as risky, therefore Mills & Boon may be attempting to solve this by emphasising the hero’s hybridity on the cover. Yet if the whitening of sheikh heroes on the covers is reflective of this hybridity, it seems odd that this would not be the case in the novels themselves, where the contrast in skin colour between the hero and heroine is regularly highlighted.
Perhaps what these covers indicate is that ‘sheikh-ness’ doesn’t necessarily have to come from the skin colour of the hero but can be indicated in other ways. For example, on the cover of The Sheikh’s Ransomed Bride the display of fabric, wood carving on the bed frame, a stone archway and a pool are Orientalist markers which signify the ethnic identity of the sheikh as well as his geographical locus in the east. The cover of The Sheikh’s Unwilling Wife is similarly clear in its use of markers of ethnicity, displaying stone arches behind the hero and heroine, and tokenistic Orientalist markers in the candle, pouring jug, vase and basket. These serve to indicate that although his skin seems to be white, the hero on the cover is still a sheikh. This may also be achieved by the novels’ title; ‘Modern Romance’ sheikh novels are the only subgenre which always indicate that the hero’s identity by using the words ‘sheikh’ (e.g. Sandra Marton’s The Sheikh’s Wayward Wife (2008)), ‘Sultan’ (The Sultan’s Virgin Bride by Sarah Morgan (2006)), ‘Desert’ (Annie West’s The Desert King’s Pregnant Wife (2008)) or Arabian (The Arabian Love-Child by Michelle Reid (2002)). So it is racial, not ethnic difference which is removed in the whitening of the sheikh hero, which begs the question: if it is not skin colour, what makes a sheikh?
———
Juliet Flesch, From Australia with Love: a History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004).
Lynne Graham, The Arabian Mistress (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2001).
Lynne Graham, The Desert Sheikh’s Captive Wife (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2008).
Sharon Kendrick, The Sheikh’s Unwilling Wife (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007).
Kim Lawrence, Desert Prince, Defiant Virgin (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2008).
Jessica Taylor, ‘And You Can Be My Sheikh: Gender, Race, and Orientalism in Contemporary Romance Novels’, Journal of Popular Culture 40.6 (2007), pp. 1032-1051.
Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘Orientalism and Mass Market Romance Novels in the Twentieth Century’, Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, ed. Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), pp. 241-262.
Annie West, The Sheikh’s Ransomed Bride (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007).
Annie West, For the Sheikh’s Pleasure (Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007).
JAMES WOOD AND THE NEW YORKER
I note that lead New Yorker literary critic James Wood has an essay in the new issue about a Hungarian novelist with an unreadable unpronouncable name. I won’t try to remember it here. The question is why Wood thinks his readership would be interested in this author. The question is: Who is that readership?
There’s no interest in the concept of “American” literature– and why should there be, from the James Wood perspective? He’s a British mercenary-for-hire, raised with an implicit British global view of the world which matches the view of the magazines he writes for. The New Yorker’s view is not toward America, but Europe, first, then the rest of the world. The world belongs to them and their highly educated imperialistic readership. More than latter-day Brits, they are current-day Romans.
I’ve advocated literary rebellion from their rear, behind their backs, to rescue American literature from them. I still advocate that.
Identity theft is one of the major problems facing people today. If your identity gets stolen, whoever has stolen it can ruin your credit and run up tons of bills in your name. It can be an expensive and frustrating problem to solve. It is possible to protect yourself from identity theft and there are several ways that you can do that. This article will focus on the features of one of these methods called Guard Dog ID Review.
More information is lost through data breaches than through anything else and causes identity protection. To an experienced thief, these breaches are like open doors into your life. They can simply walk right in and start stealing your information. This program utilizes technology that monitors databases and warns members of potential or present data breaches.
When you sign up for this program, you will be asked to fill out a questionnaire about your daily activities. This will allow the program to determine how at risk you are for identity theft. They will probably be able to point out some things that should be changed to ensure your safety.
Spyware programs are specifically designed to spy on people when they are inputting sensitive information into their computers. These programs can be picked up all over the web and they will report back to whoever is operating them on whatever they find. There is a program that will be installed to your computer that will detect and prevent spyware from attacking your computer.
Computer viruses can be designed to do a lot of things. This includes destroying and stealing the information that is on your computer. Even if nothing is stolen, they can cause a lot of damage that would be very expensive to fix. When new viruses are detected, you and any other members will receive an alert telling you about the virus. This will enable you to protect your computer better.
There are other things that we worry about other than just identity theft. Children go missing every day and it can be a horrifying experience for the parents. This program will alert every member in the general area of the missing child and provide a description of the child. This should help the child to get home quicker and safely.
It is good to know where the sex offenders in your neighborhood are so that you and your children can avoid them. Sex offenders have to tell the local authorities where they are staying and this program will inform you of any in your area. They will also alert you if new sex offenders move into your area.
Everyone should protect themselves from identity theft and this program is a viable option to anyone who want to do so with Guard Dog ID. You should always research and explore all the options available to your before making a final decision on identity theft protection reviews protection. You want to make sure that you get the best program for your money that fits your needs and the needs of anyone else in your family.
