thebookishowl.com

What’s my motivation for renewed noise against the literary elite? (Aside from their blatant corruption and obvious phoniness, their absent morality and fraudulent ideas, and my need to get word out about my ebooks?)

Right now I have a toothache which causes constant stress and aggravation. I’m not sleeping. If you have no insurance, and no money, seeing a dentist is an unreal dream.

I had a tooth like it a year ago. Eventually the tooth broke up and fell out, not without a certain amount of pain.

Poor writers in this country are in a race of time to see what happens first: you die, or all your teeth fall out.

Here’s hoping that the tooth at least makes for some strong writing!
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(To read strong writing, purchase Crime City USA, available as an ebook. Or, for more subtlety, try Mood Detroit.)

Reality America. You’ll find no stronger and relevant writing anyplace. Writing the literary elite fears to read.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures

Well, just as everyone is remarking on how the new conversant iPhone is making science fiction true to life, one pretty big part of the science fiction imagination remains just that; while the 21st century has not only arrived, we’re a decade into it, but we won’t be taking any sight seeing trips to Mars in the near future.  Even a suborbital cruise will have to wait until 2013. The overly ambitiously and to-date technically impossibly named Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company founded by British billionaire and all-around let’s do something fun and make some money at it guy Sir Richard Branson, has announced that commercial flights have been delayed for another two years.  But don’t start buying any tickets, as this is something like the fourth time the schedule has been bumped forward since flights were supposed to begin back in 2008.

If you did want to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, tickets cost 0,000, with a deposit of,000 required.  Not sure if that includes complimentary drinks.

Black Gate

A good serial will always make a good novel and a good romantic novel will often make a serial. The most obvious difference is in length.
Magazines obtain their serials by two methods. Either they are specially written for the market, or, more commonly, they are adapted by the editorial staff from a full-length novel. Most publishers make a point of submitting manuscripts with a feminine appeal to magazines, in order to sell the serial rights well before book publication. Financially, selling to a magazine is by far the better proposition. Serial rights can bring in two or three times as much – sometimes even more than a publisher’s advance. (Britton and Collin 108). ¹

They probably weren’t overstating the importance of the magazine market in that period; Joseph McAleer, who has studied the publishing history of Mills & Boon, writes that

While Mills & Boon had had a close relationship with the magazines since the 1920s, it was in the 1950s that contact intensified, and the magazines themselves become a kind of extension of the editorial department. By 1948, pre-publication serializations of Mills & Boon novels were fixtures in the top three women’s magazines, which together were selling over three million copies per week: Woman, Woman’s Own, and Woman’s Weekly [...]. This association with the weekly magazines served more than an editorial purpose. Mills & Boon reaped extra publicity when a serial ‘sold’ well, encouraging readers to seek out the complete novel in the libraries, or other titles by the author. Moreover, selling serial rights – for as much as £1,000 – helped Mills & Boon’s cash flow. The firm usually retained between 15 and 25 per cent of the serial fee. (97)

Magazines came in various types and Bridget Fowler has studied in detail

a representative sample of weekly family or women’s magazines, selecting those of the most economical design, with the lowest prices [...]. Where possible, the period analysed was July 1929 to July 1930 [...]. Not only was this a time of industrial restructuring and financial collapse, but it was also the last era before the birth of the modern, glossy, mass-circulation women’s magazine in 1932. Stories had a much more central place in the older type of magazine and were often the sole diet of fiction for their readers. The affectionate niche they acquired in the lives of their reading-public was attested by many of my respondents with working-class roots, who recalled their mothers snatching brief interludes from heavy domestic labour to enjoy the little luxury of Silver Star or the People’s Friend. (51)²

Billie Melman has focused in particular on “The Lancashire romance and the love story set in the Empire” (144) in British story papers of the 1920s. The “mill-girl story had emerged in the 1890s. Its heyday overlapped the decade between the end of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash; its decline and fall coincided with the Great Depression” (121). Indeed, “The Great Depression, which finally ruined the Lancashire cotton industry, also gave the Lancashire romance its coup-de-grâce” (133). This sub-genre does

include some stories of romantic rivalry between a mill-hand and a toff, fighting for the heart and hand of a mill girl. Usually it is the honest, industrious Lancastrian who wins. On the whole, the concept of marriage as a bond that benefits economically or socially one or both of the parties is alien to the spirit of the Lancashire romance. Matrimony is not an economic partnership, or a sanctioned sexual relationship, but a lifelong friendship between two adolescents, an extension of the ‘matiness’ of the mill. (128)

In sharp contrast to the mill-girl stories, yet existing alongside them, was a type of story whose “brand-mark was nationalism. Its symbol was the Empire. Its main characteristic was the blurring of social differences and the effacement of class consciousness” (134). Melman suggests that “The flowering of a genre that celebrated an imaginary society in which females were scarce and males plentiful may be seen as a response to the anxieties caused by the imbalance between the sexes” (136-37) in the aftermath of the First World War. There

are two patterns of romance. In the first, the emigrant story proper, an Englishwoman, newly arrived from the ‘Old Country’, finds a mate, a home and purposeful life in the unpopulated wilderness of a British dominion or colony. In the second pattern, the heroine, born of British parents in the ‘New Country’, is pursued and won by an Englishman. In both these patterns the main emphasis is upon the national and racial identity of the protagonists. The characters must be white and Anglo-Saxon. Their affiliation to race replaces other allegiances – to class, to the community, to occupation and even to gender. (137)

The story papers in which these stories appeared

were printed, on the newsprint pulp paper from which they derived their somewhat derogatory epithet, in a two- or four-column layout. The typical story paper was a weekly [...]. Its potential readers were unmarried manual workers, shop assistants, domestic servants and office workers. Married women in their early and mid twenties formed a distinct group for which a host of periodicals more domestic in outlook than the publications for adolescents catered.

The main component of the pulp weekly was fiction. The relation between the role of magazine fiction and the social status of the magazine-reading public has been noticed. The space given to fiction was in inverse proportion to the class of readers. The ‘higher’ this class, the smaller the story component. (113)

In addition, “The serial story was peculiar to working-class periodicals. [...] Middle-class publications, on the other hand, had a distinct preference for shorter fiction” (114).

William Gleason takes the study of magazine romances back even further in time, and across the Atlantic, in issue 2.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. He states that:

The mass marketing of modern romance fiction in North America began not with the emergence of Harlequin Books in the 1950s but during the dime novel and story paper boom of the 1860s and 1870s. Seeking to capitalize on the longstanding appeal of love stories, which had been appearing alongside other popular genres in the weekly family story papers since the mid-nineteenth century, many of the most influential “cheap” U.S. publishing houses—including Beadle and Adams, Street and Smith, George P. Munro, and Norman Munro—began to experiment with more distinctly marked romance series aimed primarily or exclusively at women readers. Several of these series were quite successful, others wildly so. Beadle and Adams’s Waverley Library, for example, which offered both classic fiction and popular romance novels, produced a total of 353 issues between 1879 and 1886 (Johannsen 304, 314). Street and Smith’s Bertha Clay Library, launched in 1900, ran (along with its successor, the New Bertha M. Clay Library) for more than thirty years (Carr 81). And from the mid-1880s through the 1930s popular publishers fought over exclusive rights to publish and republish the works of prolific American romance novelist Laura Jean Libbey, both as stand-alone volumes in various “library” series and as serialized novels in weekly story papers (Masteller 205). These late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publishing successes laid the groundwork for the mass marketing of popular romance with which we are familiar today.

As for me, I’ve been dipping into the digitized, online editions of Australian Women’s Weekly from 1933 to 1982. Joan Elman’s A New Car and a Lady (18 Feb. 1939) features a heroine who drives cars for a living (she works for a car show-room); the first thing she says is “Oh, but this had been a day of days! Three demonstrations since ten o’clock. Careers for women? Ugh!” (5). The anti-heroine from this story is not totally dissimilar, at least initially, to the heroine of This Frail Flower (21 August 1943) who, before the war, was “lovely and loveable, spoiled, useless” (5). She, however, finds a new purpose in life, and her old love, in a factory doing war-work. In Paul Horgan’s National Honeymoon (16 Sept. 1950) the heroine manipulates her new groom into appearing with her on a national radio programme which gives prizes to newly-weds in return for them sharing their love story with the nation. Roberta May reveals that she used to work “as a secretary [...] I wanted to keep on, but Gus wouldn’t let me” because, as he says, “I can support both of us” (10). Roberta gave up her job rather than lose Gus, but much as the job would have enabled her to “help with payments on the house” (20), their appearance on the show will allow her to have a room in that house refurbished. After the show, however, Roberta is “sorry with all her heart for what they had given away that day [...] their very own love story” (22). Gus tells her that they can get back “the important part of it” by returning all the prizes; “I’ll buy what we need, and if we can’t afford it yet we’ll wait till we can” (22). Yet again, the implication seems to be (a) a man should “support” the couple on his own, without his wife’s assistance, and (b) when a wife puts herself into the public arena (as opposed to staying safely at home) she runs the risk of damaging her marriage. The contrast between these last two stories seems to reflect the changing attitudes towards women’s work:

At the end of the war, the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor asked women workers about their future work plans [...] most women wanted to keep their present jobs. Immediately after the war, the percentage of women who worked fell as factories converted to peacetime production and refused to rehire women. In the next few years, the service sector expanded and the number of women in the workforce—especially older married women—increased significantly, despite the dominant ideology of woman as homemaker and mother. The types of jobs available to these women, however, were once again limited to those traditionally deemed “women’s work.”(History Matters)

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1The authors of this guide, Anne Britton and Marion Collin, had “both been fiction editors of women’s magazines” (dustjacket) so they clearly write from experience when they warn authors of full-length novels that:

If your manuscript is bought as a serial do not be surprised by what happens to it. You may have written about sixty-five thousand words. The fiction staff will have no qualms about cutting it to thirty thousand words if it suits them better that way. You have sold the story and unless you want to kill your market you will be wise not to complain about its new length or its new title, or even to hint that they have cut out your most brilliant passages! The staff who cut are experienced, and it is their job to know what makes a successful serial. (117-18)

I can’t help but feel that there are some parallels here with the process of translation and cutting documented by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, which led her to ask “Is thisnot a new book? And where is the writer in all of this?” (“They Seek“).

2 The romance stories themselves are described by Fowler as featuring “plots in which women are shown to be as capable of achieving production targets and intellectual attainments as men. However, in every case the working woman is reintegrated into the domestic world after marriage” (60).

——

• Britton, Anne and Marion Collin. The New Writers’ Guide: Romantic Fiction. London: T. V. Boardman, 1960.
• Fowler, Bridget. The Alienated Reader: Women and Romantic Literature in the Twentieth Century. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
• Gleason, William. “Belles, Beaux, and Paratexts: American Story Papers and the Project of Romance.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).
• McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999
• Melman, Billie. Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs. London: Macmillan, 1988.
• Wirtén, Eva Hemmung. ” ‘They Seek It Here, They Seek It There, They Seek It Everywhere’: Looking for the “Global” Book” Canadian Journal of Communication 23.2 (1998).

The covers above, from The Australian Women’s Weekly, are for 25 Feb. 1939,19 June 1943 and 14 Oct. 1950. Thumbnails of all the covers can be viewed via a “visual timeline.”

Teach Me Tonight

Fantasy Book Critic

Maybe they want her because she’s got huge… tracts of land!

I’m a fan of Dragon Magazine, or at least I was back in the 80s. That’s not to say that the now fully online version doesn’t have its good points, but when it comes to what I remember fondly from my youth, Dragon certainly ranks up there with the greats.

One of the most memorable things about the magazine were the advertisements, almost all for games that I couldn’t readily find in a gaming store. I loved looking at these and dreaming of owning games like Aftermath, Talisman, or my personal favorite Bug-Eyed Monsters: They Want Our Women.

As a child of the late 70s and early 80s I missed the creature feature glory days of the 50s and 60s, so this game was my first real indoctrination to the world of female exploitation by powers beyond the scope of simple men.

This campy style of art was so over the top, so ludicrous, that I was drawn to it like a moth to flame. I’m certain marketing departments knew this as they’d been advising great artists to show such evocative scenes on movie posters and pulp magazines for a half century before I came into the picture.

No matter my desire, both for the game and the women represented, I didn’t acquire Bug-Eyed Monsters: They Want Our Women until 2002, but by that point I’d passed the simple acceptance of the awesomeness of it all and started to question the why…

Why did they want our women? Well, I can only assume because they were hot… I mean looking at the cover of this box, produced by West End Games, got my blood racing in ways most other things couldn’t at the time, and even did a bit when I got to finally play it at the age of 30.

Um,she can’t actually breathe water so why take her?

I’m not sure what it is about this particular threat that men find so intriguing, but I’m betting it has come from the school of sacrificing virgins. It seems the subconscious mind of the Y chromosome simply gets off on the threat of female subjugation, or even the deliverance of said act [see Art of Gor].

I have to wonder if this could be some misguided desire to rescue a perspective mate from peril, ala the Prince Charming scenario or is it something darker from our primordial past? That’s certainly best left to psychologists, but I will say that there’s been no shortage of these images over the past fifty to sixty years.

Still I often wonder why something so incredibly opposite to our physiology as a bug-eyed, tentacle-armed, saucer-headed, scaly-skinned, slimy alien would want our women? I mean, it seems that no matter what, women are universally attractive in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Monsters, for their part, sure like women but at least monsters tend to be from this planet. In that argument there might be some lost DNA link between monsters and humans. Perhaps they’re the next evolutionary stage, or a mutant devolutionary throwback that just wants to be understood and accepted by our society. I mean, hey, it works for Marvel’s X-men, right? That said, I share 98.5% of my DNA with a chimp but you don’t see me dreaming about carrying one back to my lair and making half-chimps. We’re talking a pretty big stretch here.

Even if we could explain a monster’s desires, it means nothing when we take it a step further and go for aliens, as West End Games did. Now these creatures aren’t even from Earth! What reason could they possibly have for taking our women? Food? Nah, they’d be too gamey, and besides there are hundreds of protein sources on Earth better than humans. A work force? Well, women work just fine, but if you’re slaving away in some distant asteroid mining antilium-x I’d probably go with stealing men before women, especially the starlets pictured on these posters.

You know what they say about aliens with huge heads right?

I mean seriously, it should have been called, Bug-Eyed Monsters: They want our sexy women, and you can keep the rest!

Hmmm, how about creating progeny? I doubt it as have you ever seen these freaks? No amount of DNA resequencing is going to make this work, and if the alien species can travel across dozens of light years to Earth, I figure they can deal with infertility issues among their own species back home.

So what is it? The cooking? Ok, granted, my mom is an awesome cook… but my wife… not so much. These things came that far for a complete crap shoot if they’re banking on tying one of these underwear models to a stove and seeing what happens. Besides, even my mom doesn’t know the recipe for glork-flack stew.

I mean, as I go through this list I’m kind of running out of stuff unless horror of horrors there really isn’t any damn good reason they want our women. Maybe, just maybe, they’re all a bunch of intergalactic tools who want to kick sand in the face of human men like a bully on the beach. This certainly makes as much sense as anything above and really the more I think about it the more I like the idea. Why else take only the gorgeous babes? They’re sticking it to us!

It’s the ultimate slap in the face, and actually dooms the population of the planet to decades of rather moderate looking progeny. Just look at Western Europe, after two World Wars where two successive generations of the most fit and attractive men were butchered on battlefields it’s no wonder Americans look so darn good comparatively. All the best breeding stock was chewed up by enemy gunfire.

Ok, so the whole ‘Bug-Eyed Monsters want our women’ might be a rather black-humored cosmic joke, I’ll go with that, but darn it, how do you explain the robots?

This absolutely says it all

Why do robots want our women!? Now this is just frustrating. Cool in a visual sense, I mean look at the shot of Robbie the Robot with the babe in the one piece. It’s epic, but really what’s it all about? The caption says it all ‘what do these machines want with our women?’ To be perfectly honest, I have no freaking idea.

Now the Borg maybe, I mean they assimilate races into their cybernetic collective, but Robbie? Robbie is like the Michelin Man with a fresh coat of black paint and power station head. There’s certainly nothing in his hardware that jumps out with ‘needing’ women.

Are women better mechanics? That can be argued, and as mechanical engineers they hold their own, but why just steal women when any human with a M.I.T. degree would do? My only explanation; a man built Robbie and is using him to collect women for the greatest harem of his nerdy dreams. Thus, Robots don’t want our women, their creators do.

This brings me back to the original point, that men are truly the Bug-Eyed Monsters as they use a wide-eyed bush-baby stare to ogle big boobs and short skirts, and yes, they want ‘our’ women, or your woman, or any woman they can get their hands on and drag away from a domination fantasy role-play.

Is such a fantasy wrong? Probably, but that doesn’t stop men from having it. I mean its Halloween in a couple of days and dressing up as something creepy, adolescent, and socially unacceptable doesn’t end at 10. I drive by at least five fly-by-night Halloween stores a day and the windows are filled with sexy Alice in Wonderland, and Dorothy, and Queen of Hearts, all of which veritably scream to be carried away by something less than human, so we’ve not really moved on from these images have we?

I guess that means that Bug-Eyed Monsters are here to say, and I’m going to be ok with that. Now the real question should be would I throw on some robot armor and carry my half-clothed wife to the bedroom if given a chance? Well… ok, ok, we’ve got to slow this thing down because I’m now seriously thinking about where I can get a Robbie the Robot outfit in L.A…

Until next time, Happy Halloween, and may any of you reading this find your perfect Bug-Eyed Monster or Damsel in Distress because we all deserve to have a little fantasy fun now and then!

Black Gate

“an ever-fixed mark“?

Issue 2.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies was released last week and among the essays is Lynne Pearce’s “Romance and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love” in which she argues that “the question of whether love is, or is not, repeatable is at the very centre of attempts to both define and understand it.” Pearce suggests that “Western culture still clings to the notion that ‘true love’ is both durable and non-repeatable: it is, by definition, an emotion that stands the test of time.” She then outlines some of the implications this has had for romantic fiction, a term which, it should be noted, refers to a group of texts including, but not limited to, romance novels:

How romantic fiction has, in practice, dealt with the spectre of repetition is surely a question worthy of investigation, and—although I have not had the opportunity to conduct such a survey as yet—I offer below some hypothetical models predicated upon the canon of classic romance:

1. Happy Marriage: The most popular solution to the problem is to avoid repetition completely by focusing on only one relationship for the duration of the story and then bring the romance in question to a clean and definitive ending in marriage (“the white wedding”). If previous relationships did feature for one or both of the parties, they are very manifestly not “the real thing” and explained away (see 2 and 3 following). Even though common-sense tells us that it is impossible for any relationship to come to a fixed point, the illusion of closure remains one of the most singular pleasures that romance fiction trades in.
2. Discredited Former Relationship 1: As in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet wherein Romeo is enamoured of a girl called Rosalind before he meets with Juliet. Although this “repetition” of behaviour has the potential to debase “genuine love,” Romeo’s devotion to Rosalind is treated comically, with the Nurse roundly sending up his heart-sick lament. Discrediting previous relationships through the implication that they were (for example) predicated upon lust, or convenience, rather than love is clearly a neat way of solving the repetition problem. In other words, the characters (and especially the male characters) can be permitted more than one relationship, providing that only the current one is “the real thing.”
3. Discredited Former Relationship 2: As in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, there is also the possibility of a character having been “in love” more than once through a plot device which ensures that that the previous love-object is retrospectively discredited. This scenario was perfected in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca , a text in which it is possible to accept that Maxim loved both Rebecca and the narrator but only because his first wife is subsequently exposed as “not quite all that she seemed.”
4. Definitive Death: Here the notional finitude of marriage is replaced by the absolute finitude of death. The fact that there is no possibility of death-bound lovers repeating, and hence discrediting, their UR-passion explains why tragedy remains the most cast-iron means of supporting the view that love is exclusive, non-repeatable, and forever. The fact that so many tragic lovers actively seek death as a means of protecting their love from compromise underlines the principle that “true love” eschews repetition.
5. Duplicitous Afterlife: Although clearly a variant of “Death,” the solution offered by Gothic Romance is remarkable inasmuch as it simultaneously eschews and embraces repetition. While it is true that the star-crossed lovers at the centre of a Gothic Romance must never be seen to recover from their (one and only) love or its loss, this need not prevent them attempting a re-union with the lost loved-object (or, on occasion, his/her “double”) beyond the grave. Further, the crimes and mishaps that have caused the lovers to be doomed are subsequently seen to repeat those of their forbears and/or to generate a repetition in future generations (Pearce 86). In this respect, then, Gothic Romance must be seen as an instance of a genre both having its cake and eating it: “Genuine Love” is, of course, unique and forever—but so is the (doomed) will-to-repetition.

Taken together, then, what these models suggest is that, throughout history, romance has been consummately successful in side-stepping the problem that repetition poses for the integrity of love, through plot devices that either draw the curtain on previous/subsequent relationships or, alternatively, find some means of discrediting former love-affairs after the event.

——

• Pearce, Lynne. “Romance and Repetition: Testing the Limits of Love.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 2.1 (2011).

The image is a Cupid weathervane from Pentlow, Essex, photographed by Keith Evans (via Wikimedia Commons).

Teach Me Tonight

I’ve just now had the chance to read Heather Jackson’s engaging essay “What’s Biography Got to Do With It?” in the June 2011 ERR (this was her plenary at the 2010 NASSR, a conference I sadly had to miss; from the papers in ERR, it looks like it was extraordinary!). I’d been meaning to get to this article since the issue arrived and I’m glad I finally did. Jackson looks back at the world of Romantic-era literary biography in order to think about why our own students (and the general public) often seem so stubbornly invested in talking about writers’ lives when we want them to talk about literary works, and she comes up with some provocative answers—for instance:

What we normally think of as literary biography, the large-scale, original, comprehensive, authored account of a writer’s life, has less to do with the evolution of any writer’s reputation than you might think, but the short, derivative, introductory, often anonymous summary that appears in prefaces and works of reference has more. […] When we ask why readers are not satisfied with the works just as they come and why they turn to biographical sources when they want more — why biography should be the default solution —we have […] the fact that ancient prefatory traditions have always organized information that way and thereby formed a habit that it may be impossible to break. (370)

“Is that a problem?,” Jackson wonders. I’ve been thinking myself a good deal about the role of biography in our (my) teaching of Romanticism, and it’s been a topic particularly on my mind this week: the bookstore’s been nagging me for the booklist for the honors seminar on “Romantic Lives” I’m teaching this spring, and we’ve just been doing The Prelude in my graduate British Romanticism seminar and “Tintern Abbey” in my undergraduate Romantic Poetry survey, so the idea, or problem, of the authorial life has been front and center in our discussions and in my planning for class. Reading Jackson’s essay prompts me to post some of my own thinking on the topic here, and to invite readers of this blog to conversation: what role does the biography of writers—either biography as a literary genre, or the idea of the writer’s life—play in your teaching of Romanticism? How is the writer’s life, or even the writer as personality or character, an element of the way you present the writer’s work to your students, or the interpretative frames you put into play? Do you assign biographies, or teach biography or autobiography as a genre, or talk about how and why the writer’s life became an object of interest? How do you deal with the power of mythic versions of author’s lives? How do you combat the rush to Wikipedia or other internet capsule biography as an answer to anything and everything?

Like many of us I’m sure, I find myself often frustrated by the way students wield as very blunt instruments supposed biographical “facts” they’ve gotten by googling, or heard from friends, or vaguely remembered from high school. What disturbs me is not so much the recourse to biography itself as the eagerness to reduce not only the complexity of the work, but also the complexity of the writer’s life, to a single determining biographical fact or myth. It’s strange, really, that students can imagine anyone’s life in the monodimensional terms in which they sometimes seem to imagine the lives of the authors they read. This retreat from complexity is no doubt partly an anxiousness about the work of interpretation (they’re worried they don’t know how to do it) but it also has parallels in the media attention given to each latest diagnosis granting a long-dead writer or artist a medical or psychological condition that “explains” his or her “genius”—an impulse to pathologize and explain away creativity that reflects both a lack of imagination and a fear of imagination. Still, I’ve come increasingly to think that in answer to what Jackson calls “our biographical woes in the classroom” (365) we need more biography in the classroom, not less. If students too often rely on reductive biographical readings, it might be because they don’t have enough exposure to more sophisticated, complex versions of biography, nor enough experience with more nuanced understandings of the interactions of life and text. In other words, if students are all too eager to fall back on biographical fallacy or weak biographical criticism, this might be an effect of the institutionalization (at the high school as well as college level) of a pedagogy so hyperanxious about the possibility of biographical contamination that it pretends to rule biography itself out of court. I say pretends because the author’s life persists as an organizing principle of our pedagogy in many often unacknowledged ways, as Jackson argues, and because of course we don’t presume any such strict separation of biography and criticism in our own work as critics. In our effort to convince students not to read everything as directly self-expressive, we give them the confusing message that the author’s life isn’t something to be read.

Curiosity about writers’ lives isn’t a bad thing for students to have if they know how to research those lives capably, if they can understand that writers were real people—and so not fully “knowable”—living in real historical circumstances different from their own, and if they can recognize that the authorial personality they imagine they encounter or the authorial voice they imagine they hear is a fiction, a product of specific reception histories and of particular desires and needs (their own, the writer’s, a culture’s). So how then to help students become more savvy about the uses of biography, and how to make curiosity about the author’s life work for us, as teachers of literature?  Here, we have an advantage as Romanticists, since so many Romantic literary works blur the boundaries between life and text in ways we can use to get students asking better questions about how life and work connect. For example: Frankenstein refuses straightforwardly autobiographical readings yet on so many levels seems to refract or transpose aspects of Mary Shelley’s own experience as writer, mother, daughter, and wife—and then reflects in such complicated ways on the problem of telling, or hearing, a life story—that it can lead marvelously into rich discussions of the complexity of the competing pressures Shelley experienced and the complicated nature of the way autobiography is woven, along with many other strands of meaning, into the web of the novel. Don Juan’s extraordinary along these lines as well. Conversely, explicitly autobiographical texts such as The Prelude or “Lines…Tintern Abbey” gain in significance for students when they think about the choices (of genre, of emphasis or omission, of language) the poet makes in presenting experience in a particular, public form, and when they come to see the poem as an argument about what that experience has been and what it means. This helps them shake their biographical literalism. In teaching “Tintern Abbey,” I usually foreground the dialogue with “Frost at Midnight,” and we consider Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal writing alongside these poems to help students think about public and private modes of writing the self.

I agree with Heather Jackson’s suggestion that students would benefit from a greater familiarity with biography as a literary genre, and I think full-length biographies of writers can be a useful contextualizing tool. In some smaller seminars, I’ve experimented with asking students to choose from among a list of modern biographies of writers we’re reading; in the assignments I give them for reports on these biographies, I ask them to pay attention to formal and rhetorical aspects of the biography, and we compare how different biographers represent the same episodes from a subject’s life. The goal is to have the students understand biography as representation, interpretation, and argument, rather than something simply to be mined for facts. The better biographies also gave students a vivid sense of the historical and intellectual contexts of the writers we were studying, and a sense of their existence in a particular time and place.  In larger classes, I’ve found myself using more biographical anecdotes about writers—which can feel kind of donnish, but which works both to help situate the writers in a historical context and as a lure for students, who might then feel engaged by the idea of the writer as a person who works through, in his or her writing, particular sets of more or less urgent personal and political and philosophical concerns, even if not necessarily in the mode of self-expression.

However, I still find all of this kind of tricky. There’s a part of me that’s very uneasy about giving authorial personality too much presence in the classroom, even if it’s in a more deconstructive mode emphasizing the textualization of the life. There’s the recognition that neither as an undergrad nor in grad school was I ever actually assigned even an excerpt from a biography as far as I can recall, so now I feel a bit on shaky ground when I try to do it. There’s the problem of time on the syllabus and in class discussion: how can we squeeze it all in? There’s the risk that students will still reach for biography as reductive explanation, or that they’ll want to turn class discussion into a debate, daytime-talk-show-style, on whether the writers we’re studying were good or appealing people, or that we’ll be reinforcing mythologies of the author or of genius. Then there’s what I’ve come to think of as the “five summers with the length of five long winters” problem—if you’re teaching, say, “Tintern Abbey,” practically speaking, in the limited discussion time you have, what do you do to describe that five-year gap? Do you talk about the gap between WW’s first visit and his return solely in terms given by the poem itself (entirely possible and effective)? Do you talk about the gap by discussing his evolving philosophical or political thinking in biographical terms, or do you place the poem in wider intellectual or cultural contexts? Do you talk about what he did and where he was specifically in those five years—how literal do you get about the “lonely rooms” or the “fretful stir/unprofitable” (in my experience, students often ask for more detail here)? Do you emphasize the historical resonances of the date (e.g., Corday/Marat)? Ideally, one pulls together these various registers, so that students can think about how Wordsworth negotiates a relationship between his life and broader sweeps of history. When that works, it’s great, but it’s hard not to feel like either the individual life or the historical sweep gets the short end of the stick. And I haven’t yet taken on a class where we talk substantially about the history of literary biography—though that will come in the spring, with the “Romantic Lives” class, and I’m wondering how it will work. More on that upcoming class–and on this topic–soon, I hope.

Teaching Romanticism: An RC Pedagogies Blog

A list of the past week’s Largehearted Boy features:

52 Books, 52 Weeks Book Reviews (my weekly short book review)

Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot

Book Notes (authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their book)

Christopher Bollen for his novel Lightning People
Ismet Prcic for his novel Shards
John Warner for his novel The Funny Man
Joshua Cody for his memoir [sic]
Paul Maliszewski for his short story collection Prayer and Parable
Sara Zarr for her novel How to Save a Life

Lists:

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads

Weekly contest:

Win Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84 and a 0 Threadless Gift Certificate

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

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