Literary Studies

literary study skills, book reviews, and recommended reading

literary skills, book reviews, and further reading

Research Methods for English Studies

April 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

new approaches to literary studies for post-graduates

Research Methods for English Studies is a collection of essays on the subject of research skills, methods, and methodology in the field of literary studies. The essays betray a profound unease which has (quite rightly) begun to infect this branch of academic activity. For they are in a sense answers to questions which are rarely if ever asked in this section of the humanities. Questions such as ‘What exactly is research in literary studies? What methods are used? What validity do the results have? Indeed, compared to other subjects such as biology, history, physics, astronomy, and sociology, what is literary studies about?

Some practitioners can answer these questions by taking fast hold of a vaguely related discipline and writing about the biography of an author, the genesis and publication history of a text, or the nature of its reception by the reading public. But the vast majority of what is called literary studies (and not just ‘English’) is nothing more than one person’s opinions about a text or a body opf work. Even worse, it may be opinions about opinions, or opinions about theories. There will be no declaration of critical method attached to works submitted for assessment or publication, no theory to be tested or conditions which can be reproduced – only a long bibliography of works consulted, packed out with the names and works of currently fashionable critics.

This is the state off affairs that has obtained for a long time in institutions of higher education, and in the prevailing climate it is likely to be coming to an end. These essays, whilst betraying unease, are also in a sense offering a lifeline to those who wish to find a niche for themselves in departments of literature or humanities. They are saying ‘Look! Here’s a new angle, so that you can retain tenure’.

Carolyn Steedman (a historian) for instance offers a chapter on the romance of working in archives, though she has no specific advice on what you might do when you get to it. Mary Evans promotes ‘auto/biography’ as a new approach – but this misses the fact that writing accounts of authors’ personal lives is a form of history, not literary studies. The activity of considering a number of biographies of Sylvia Plath amounts to not much more than a higher form of weekend supplement celebrity gossip, which says nothing about her poetry.

Next comes oral reminiscence. The argument here is that this enables a recovery of lost or forgotten history. All well and good, but there is no explanation of how this applies to literary studies. The example discussed merely compares the memories of a Home Guard volunteer with the accuracy or otherwise of Dad’s Army.

A chapter on visual methodologies carries with it similar problems. It is quite true that pictures can be analysed and interpreted, but since the vast majority of literary texts have no illustrations at all, it is difficult to to imagine how such an approach would help us to understand An Essay on Criticism or King Lear.

Discourse analysis looks more promising, because it focusses its attention on language, but an analysis of the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice stretches for a whole page without mentioning the term irony, though it does have space to complain about the text’s ‘focus on heteronormativity’. But at least Gabrielle Griffin goes on to explain how computer programs can be used to analyse texts – an activity which might keep somebody in post via a research grant whilst legitimately claiming to be literary studies.

Ethnographic studies at first seems a possibility, but studies of how readers consume texts, why they choose one book rather than another, and what the significance of their activity might be – all are ultimately sociological questions or matters of private biography. They do not contribute to literary understanding or interpretation.

Catherine Belsey appears to be on much firmer ground with ‘textual analysis’. Indeed, she even offers a practical exercise to demonstrate its efficacy. But her exercise has problems right from the outset. First of all she analyses a painting (Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia) and then she does nothing but raise questions about its meaning, based on nothing more than you could gain from a few minutes in front of the object, with an encyclopedia or Google search open by your side.

With much invoking of Roland Barthes, she argues that meanings in a text are ‘ultimately undecidable’, which she sees as good news for researchers, because it will keep them in business for ever. This is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy that today’s crop of post-graduates would do well to treat with extreme caution when applying for grants funded by tax-payers’ money.

There’s a whole chapter on interviewing authors (more celebrity gossip) and even creative writing as ‘research’ before the collection ends with the most sensible chapter of all – the use of computational technology as an aid to research. This includes the digitisation of primary sources, computer-aided textual analysis, the creation of electronic texts, and the establishment of multi-featured hypertext editions. All of these approaches are of use to other scholars, and they tend to be free of the ‘Look at me’ attitudes which infest much of what passes for contemporary criticism. It’s significant that this chapter has by far the largest and most useful supplement of suggested further reading and follow-up web sites.

So – this rabbit is finally pulled out of the hat at the very end – but anyone following the general advice in this book should be warned. In the current economic climate many of these self-indulgent approaches to ‘research’ are likely to be doomed. Some of the contributors to this volume are likely to be listed for early retirement by the time you come to read what they have written.

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Gabrielle Griffin (ed), Research Methods for English Studies Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp.248, ISBN: 0748621555

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Romantic Moderns

October 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

writers, artists, and the English sense of place

Romantic Moderns is a major piece of work by a young cultural historian with a free-ranging approach to her subject. It’s a study of a particular strain in English art that Alexandra Harris correctly describes as ‘romantic’, and illustrates as permeating every aspect of cultural life. The period she covers is the late 1930s through to the immediate post-war period. It would be interesting to know if the title of the PhD on which the book is based had a sub-title more specific than the one she provides here – because ‘from Virginia Woolf to John Piper’ is rather wide in scope. After all, Woolf was born in 1882, and Piper lived until 1992 – so that’s a span covering the late Victorian era, two world wars, and the digital age.

Her writing is certainly lively and entertaining. She throws off multiple references that explode like fireworks in almost every paragraph. A consideration of architecture leads to books on buildings, then pictures of buildings, and on to novels that feature them. This cultural enthusiasm is both a strength and a weakness, because whilst the names, titles, and references come thick and fast, it’s sometimes difficult to identify the main point of her argument.

She’s fizzing with information, but I was sometimes longing for an overview or a generalization. The nearest I spotted was that the people she discusses were all interested in the relationship between ‘art and place’.

She covers an astonishingly wide range of topics. Subjects include English country houses (of the Brideshead type) seascapes, Victorian revivalism, cuisine and gastronomy, the BBC, literary criticism, watercolour painting, music, travel writing, film, landscape gardening, and even the weather.

The artists whose work she discusses include John Betjemann, Eric Ravilious, Cecil Beaton, Edward Bawden, Paul Nash, Benjamin Britten, and Graham Sutherland – and those are just some of the best known. She also deals with a whole host of lesser figures – architects, film-makers, milliners, and interior designers,

It’s a world of country gardens, southern seascapes, churches, and images of a bucolic past. There are no cities, motor cars, iron foundries, or telephones in the iconography of this view of the world. Almost all topographical references come from below a line drawn between the Severn and the Wash. In fact you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole of English culture had been generated within the boundaries of Sussex.

The other worrying and recurrent problem in her approach is that modern English romantic art began much earlier than the late thirties in which she pitches most of her comment. The Georgian poets, water-colourists, and engravers all got under way in the second decade of the century, as a reaction to the brutality of the first world war and a sense that an idyllic past was being lost.

She makes a brave case for pastoral romanticism being an enduring feature in English culture, but it is based on selective (though widespread) evidence, and a nostalgic enthusiasm for a view of the world based on the village green. This can be seen as embarrassingly conservative at a time of Hitler’s extermination of Jews, Stalin’s show trials, and the onset of a fully mechanised second world war.

Her capacity for detail uncovers some interesting points – such as T.S. Eliot exchanging views on blood and soil with anti-Semitic and eugenics-supporting Viscount Lymington. It was but a small step from this to Eliot’s belief in religious notions of ‘continuity’ and nationhood. But the arguments on inherent (almost genetic) national feeling for pastoralism are somewhat dented when she cites the work of Bill Brandt, who was German, and Eliot himself, who came from St Louis, Missouri – not East Coker.

The latter part of the book deals with an unashamed celebration of the glamour and romance of the large English country house, focusing on its presence in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Osbert Sitwell, and Evelyn Waugh. This doesn’t add a lot more to what has gone before, except to intensify an overt nostalgia for disappearing aristocratic worlds.

It might seem churlish to dwell on the weaknesses of such an enthusiastic and beautifully written study, but I think it would be patronising to a work pitched at this level not to take its arguments seriously enough to question them. Anyway, the book is already a runaway success, and its rich cream pages and high quality colour illustrations are sure to delight anyone who buys it.

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Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, London: Thames and Hudson, 2010, pp.320, ISBN: 0500251711

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Studying Fiction

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

guide to the basics of literary analysis – plus short stories

Many adult students have spent most of their lives reading fiction in the form of stories and novels. However, when it comes to making a formal academic study of literature – especially at undergraduate level – it’s hard to find the right words in which to express your understanding of a text. That’s why this book was written. Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the technical terms you will need when making a study of prose fiction.

It shows you how to apply the elements of literary analysis by explaining them one at a time, and then showing them at work in a series of short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. The materials are carefully graded, so that you start from simpler literary concepts, then work gradually towards more complex issues. The guide contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens. All of them are excellent and very entertaining tales in their own right. The guidance notes help you to understand the literary techniques being used in each case.

Eight chapters deal separately with issues such as the basics of character and story; point of view, symbolism, irony, and theme; literary language and ‘appreciation’; the techniques of close reading; the social context of literature; narrators and interpretation; and an explanation of literary terms.

The book works as a form of self-instruction programme. You first of all read the story; then a particular literary concept is explained in relation to the story; a series of questions are posed [with answers] which allow you to test your understanding; and the chapter ends with suggestions for further reading.

OK – this is what’s called an ‘author’s own review’, so I’ve tried to be as unbiased as possible. If anybody else wishes to produce a review, I’ll be happy to add it. Alternatively, you can read somebody else’s review at Amazon here

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Roy Johnson, Studying Fiction, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp.226, ISBN 0719033977

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The Author

November 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

theories of authorship from Homer to the present

This volume in the Critical Idiom series investigates the changing definitions of the author, what it has meant historically to be an ‘author’, and the impact that this has had on literary culture. Andrew Bennett discusses the various theoretical debates surrounding authorship, exploring such concepts as authority, ownership, originality, and the ‘death’ of the author. Scholarly, yet stimulating, this study offers the ideal introduction to a core notion in critical theory.

He deals with the fundamental question of ‘what is an author?’ and its correlative ‘what does the text mean?’ Asking these question leads to others which take into account copyright law, printing technology, censorship, plagiarism, and forgery. The study begins (rather curiously) by looking at two influential essays – Roland Bathes’s ‘The Death of the Author’, and Michel Foucault’s riposte ‘What is an Author?’ Their theories appear to remove the author, but in fact they are just saying that taking the author into account is only one way of interpreting a text.

You need a strong intellectual stomach to take this as a starting point. Andrew Bennett might have been kinder to his readers if he had led up to this abstract theorising after an explanation of more traditional notions of authorship, such as that offered by Martha Woodmansee which he quotes:

an individual who is solely responsible – and thus exclusively deserving of credit – for the production of a unique, original work

Beginners could easily skip to chapter two and come back later, because he then goes on to trace the history of authorship through European cultural history.

First there is the question of Homer. Was he a real person, of just a ‘figure of speech’ or a ‘back-formation’ in the tradition of oral poetry which produced The Iliad and The Odyssey?

In the medieval period the author was only one of a number of people who might contribute to the composition of a work. Their fundamental concept of authorship was different than ours, and the author might even be anonymous:

Since manually copied books were … distributed amongst the limited circle of the writer’s community, adding the writer’s name to a manuscript was largely redundant. [Then] as the copied manuscript was disseminated more widely, the writer’s name became irrelevant in a different, opposite sense: precisely because the writer was not known to readers outside his community, his name had little importance.

There’s a fascinating discussion of Chaucer as a major transitional figure who straddles three traditions: the oral poet performing to a group; the writer working in a textual tradition; and the precursor of a modern author who inserts himself between the text and the reader. It is at this point that the modern concept of authorship enters European culture – at the end of the fourteenth century.

Then comes the important development of the age of printing. This changes everything, and introduces notions of control, censorship, and copyright. This in turn leads to some mind-turning concepts – for instance that print leads to something fundamentally new and contributes to the process of individualisation. Much of his argument at this point is heavily indebted to the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein and Walter Ong.

It should be remembered that in the early Renaissance there was “an aristocratic disdain for the profession of writing and a prejudice against publication in print on account of its perceived propensity to undermine the fragile class boundary between the aristocracy and the lower gentry”.

This is a tough read, but it’s exciting because it raises so many issues that are important to our understanding of what constitutes ‘literary studies’, and it also seems that these relationships between author, text, and reader are being given a re-shaping with the advent of the Internet and digital writing (though he doesn’t deal with that).

He covers Romantic notions of authorship, which persisted well into the twentieth century, then looks at Formalism, Feminism, and New Historicism. This involves the famous Wimsatt and Beardsley essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’; the attempts made by feminists to reconcile ‘death of the author’ with their desire to rescue women authors; and what he sees as the New Historicists failure to get rid of the individual creator.

There’s a chapter on collaborative authorship which also includes consideration of film, and he ends by testing out contemporary notions of authorship on recent examples of literary ‘events’ – in particular the publication of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters.

This will be of interest to all students of literature at undergraduate level and above – and in particular those taking courses which include consideration of authorship and the history of the book. One thing is for sure. Anyone who has not considered these theoretical issues before will find some thought-provoking ideas here.

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Andrew Bennett, The Author, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pp.151, ISBN: 0415281644

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The Intellectuals and the Masses

June 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

pride and prejudice: literary modernists 1880-1939

This book has been around for a while now. I read it on the strength of having enjoyed John Carey’s more recent What Good Are The Arts? His basic argument is that with the rise of mass democracy and universal education at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, artists and intellectuals reacted with fear to this phenomenon and both denigrated the ordinary person and at the same time deliberately made their art more difficult to understand. It’s a study of literary modernists and their anti-democratic sentiments.

None of the major figures of literary modernism escapes his charge: D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot are all quoted making remarks which are undemocratic, elitist, racist, and tainted with a supremacism which Carey traces back to Nietzsche. This basic argument is then extended to the intellectually snobbish dislike of the ‘suburbs’ which were built to house the growing numbers of clerks to service the expanding financial and commercial sectors of the economy.

Here Graham Greene, John Betjemann, G.K. Chesterton, and Evelyn Waugh come in for a similar type of criticism – though they are not accused of putting their writing beyond the reach of the common reader. Returning to Nietzsche’s influence via his ideas about ‘natural aristocrats’ and ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Carey shows these views of the lofty superman alive and well in the work of Lawrence and Graham Greene – and he punctures their lightweight adoption in the work of art critic Clive Bell with his characteristically mordant humour:

So we find, for example, Clive Bell hymning ‘the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art’, and contrasting them with the herd who frequent the ‘snug foothills of warm humanity’. Bell’s language figures himself and fellow aesthetes as engaged upon dangerous and energetic pursuits, when in fact they are merely looking at pictures and reading books.

This is not the only time he points to the false metaphors in which art is often discussed: ‘Spatial metaphors of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture are logically meaningless, of course.’ There’s also an interesting reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World which, for all its satirical Utopianism, he reveals as a covert defence of Nietzschean or Christian ‘redemptive suffering’.

In the latter part of the book he offers four ‘case studies’ – in-depth readings of the works of George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Wyndham Lewis. He uncovers some fairly unhealthy attitudes in Gissing, though I was surprised that he let him off the charge of profound snobbery which made me feel like hurling New Grub Street across the room last time I read it.

It’s not quite as clear why he includes Wells – because his only flaw seems to be a fear of overpopulation coupled with a submerged form of misogyny. But Arnold Bennett turns out to be the book’s hero. Carey describes his writings as ‘a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals’ case against the masses’ – and he goes on to give a spirited case for his works as a sympathetic insight into the lives of ordinary people, and a defence of suburbia. In fact he takes on Virginia Woolf’s argument against Bennett in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ and demolishes it completely.

He saves his maximum invective for last – and unleashes it on Wyndham Lewis, whose views he argues are not dissimilar to those of Adolf Hitler. And just in case we misunderstand, he points out that this is not simply crude anti-Semitism and a hatred for jazz music and Negroes, but that Hitler, like the other intellectuals of modernism, believed in an intellectual hierarchy, in great art which was produced by special individuals endowed with quasi-religious insights (rather like God, in fact) and that none of this was accessible to the masses. The implication however was that it was accessible to the people making these judgments – such as Clive Bell up on his cold white peaks.

This is a very spirited polemic, which also serves to remind us that many of the technological advances in the early modern era were often regarded with scepticism bordering on outright rejection by the soi-disant intellectuals. Radio, newspapers, photography, cinema, and rail travel were all vilified at one time or another – and the masses who seemed to enjoy them were both sneered at and condemned as philistines.

If you’re going to look at Carey’s views on art, read this one first, before What Good Are The Arts? – then you will have a clearer notion of where his ideas come from. For anyone interested in literary modernism, the history of ideas, or modern cultural criticism, it’s an exhilarating read.

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John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, London: Faber, 1992, pp.246, ISBN: 0571169260

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The Modern Movement

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

themes and developments in English Literature 1910-1940

Although writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster produced their work almost a hundred years ago, we still class their work as ‘modernism’. That’s because they made such a radical break with the preceding century, and the fact is that some of their experiments have not been surpassed in the literature produced since.

Chris Baldick’s comprehensive study sketches in the social, linguistic, and aesthetic background of the period, then groups his discussion of examples according to literary forms – short stories, drama, poetry, and the novel. He naturally highlights the major figures – Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot – but his other concern is to show the traditional literary culture out of which the modernist experiment emerged at the beginning of the last century.

This involves consideration of writers such as Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, and now almost-forgotten figures such as Dornford Yates, Aldous Huxley, and Elizabeth Bowen who were very successful in their own time.

The Modern Movement ranges broadly, covering psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, ‘light reading’, essays, biography, satire (Waugh, Huxley, Lewis, Isherwood) children’s books, and other literary forms evolving in response to the new anxieties and exhilarations of twentieth-century life. He also introduces chapters which focus on themes such as Childhood, the Great War, and Sexuality.

He’s particularly well informed on what’s often called ‘the writer and the marketplace’ – that is, the financial realities which lie beneath the occupation of authorship. He knows who earned most (Arnold Bennett) he reveals which writers were subsidised by rich patrons (Joyce of course, as well as others who were subsidised by wealthy spouses). I was amazed to learn that D.H. Lawrence not only made a lot of money out of the privately published Lady Chatterley’s Lover but that he went on to make even more by investing it in stocks and shares on Wall Street.

One small feature comes off nicely. Each chapter is preceded by a list of new words which came into currency at the time, and they always seem to emerge earlier than you would guess – blurb, umpteen, back-pack, and tear-jerker for instance.

He even includes an interesting presentation of theories of the novel – which involves consideration of first and third person narration. This ties in the connections between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and lays out the groundwork for the central chapters on Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Forster.

Baldick interprets all the major works of these writers – Howards End, Mrs Dalloway, Ulysses, Women in Love – in a way that makes you feel like immediately reading them again. But en route he takes time to look at the lesser-known works of the period, such as Love on the Dole, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow, and novels by Naomi Mitchison, Robert Graves, and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

I remember reading Walter Allen’s The English Novel and Tradition and Dream many years ago, and this is a similar experience. Authors, novels, books, and ideas jump off every page, and anybody with an appetite for literature will feel a terrific urge to follow up on the suggestions he holds out.

There’s a very good collection of further reading at the back of the book. These entries combine biographical notes on the author, together with available editions of their major works, plus secondary studies and criticism.

This is the fifth volume to be published in the Oxford English Literary History series. It can be read continuously as an in-depth study of the period, or used as a rich source of reference.

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Chris Baldick, The Modern Movement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.477, ISBN: 0198183100

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The Oxford Guide to Plays

November 5, 2011 by Roy Johnson

plots, characters, staging, history, performance

The Oxford Guide to Plays is a great idea! It’s a book that gives accounts of the most important, best known, and most popular plays of world theatre. It’s odd that nobody has thought of this before. The result is a handy reference work which offers a summary of each play’s plot, and a commentary on its historical context and performance history. It also includes details of the setting, genre, authorship, and cast. The plays are arranged in A-Z order for accessibility, and multiple indexes provide details of playwrights and major characters.

Entries range from Abigail’s Party and Absurd Person Singular, via The Mahabharata and The Master Builder, to Zaire and Zoo Story. Around 80 of the most significant plays – from The Oresteia to Waiting for Godot – are dealt with in more detail.

Genres covered include: burlesque, comedy, farce, historical drama, kabuki, masque, melodrama, morality play, mystery play, No, romantic comedy, tragicomedy, satire, and tragedy. The plot summaries are interesting, because despite being objectively descriptive, they can’t help but be interpretive. So you get a summary of the plot, but also one way of looking at it. Here’s an example:

Homecoming, The

A: Harold Pinter Pf: 1965, London Pb: 1965; rev 1968 G: Drama in 2 acts S: House in north London, early 1960s CC: 5m, 1f

Max, a 70-year-old retired butcher and widower, lives in a house with his fastidious younger brother Sam, a chauffeur, and his two sons, Lenny, a pimp, and Joey, a demolition man and would-be boxer. Max, who enjoys reminiscing about the past, dominates the household, which is characterised by bickering and arguments. That night, Teddy, Max’s eldest son, arrives unexpectedly with his English wife Ruth. Teddy is a professor of philosophy at a university in America, where he lives with Ruth and their three sons. He now wants to introduce the somewhat apprehensive Ruth to his family. Everyone is asleep …

That’s one way of looking at it. But anybody who knows their Pinter will recognise that some of these apparently straightforward details may or may not be true. It’s a question of interpretation.

It’s interesting to note that reading some of these plot summaries gave me a strong desire to see the play performed again – something that is increasingly possible via DVD recordings which are these days made of stage performances.

Anyone with an academic, professional, amateur, or recreational interest in the theatre will find this a useful source of reference – for looking up details of particular plays, perhaps to check on the author, or on when they were first performed.

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Michael Patterson, Oxford Guide to Plays,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.523, ISBN: 0198604181

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The Renaissance Computer

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

information architecture in early print technology

The Renaissance Computer is a collection of essays which seek to explore the similarities, connections, and lessons to be drawn from a comparison of the advent of digital technology with the age of print in the immediate post-Gutenberg period. In the 15th century the printing press was the ‘new technology’. The first ever information revolution began with the advent of the printed book, enabling Renaissance scholars to formulate new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge.

The basic argument is that the proliferation of printed texts was as revolutionary and presented similar problems of information architecture, storage, and retrieval as we feel we have now in our digital age. The earliest attempts at memory and storage systems were remarkably similar to the Windows operating system, though the fact that they were made physically manifest made them cumbersome and non-portable. Nevertheless, it would have been wonderful to visit Giulio Camillo’s memory theatre, where a visitor occupied the stage, and all the knowledge of mankind was stored on the tiered rows of what would normally be seats.

Editor Jonathan Sawday looks at precursors of the modern computer in the work of Milton, Hobbes, Pascal, Liebnitz, and Descartes. There’s a chapter on the role of illustrations in early modern books, another looks at the role of the index, title page, marginalia, and contents page as early examples of hypertext and navigation.

The authors also point to the amazing persistence of some outmoded technological forms:

Recent work on the circulation of manuscript collections of poetry in the seventeenth century…has demonstrated that this form of publication survived for two centuries after the invention of the printing press. The modern researcher who, seated in the rare book rooms of the Huntington Library or the British Library, laboriously copies out passages from an early printed book is participating in an ancient tradition.

There is a very interesting (and more readable) chapter on Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion (1624), an encyclopedia on women. The link with computers is no more than the suggestion that it’s a cut and paste composition, but the content sounds so interesting it made me feel I wanted to read a copy.

These chapters are scholarly academic conference papers – and the have both their strengths and weaknesses. Wide ranging and well informed, but often looking for connections where none exist or finding them to little purpose.

The idea of a Renaissance computer is only a catchy idea. These studies are of how information was organised in text form, how it was understood and retrieved, and how the Renaissance book tackled issues of information architecture which many people now think of as something new.

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Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (eds), The Renaissance Computer: knowledge technology in the first age of print, London: Routledge, 2000, pp.212, ISBN: 0415220645

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Victorian Literature and Culture

July 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

historical context + survey of all literary genres

This is a guidance book for students or general readers who want to know more about literary studies in the Victorian period. It’s in four parts: the historical and intellectual background; the literature of the period considered in separate genres; critical approaches; and a set of resources for independent study. After a quick overview of what is in fact a long period of history (1837-1901) Maureen Moran goes straight into the themes and issues that constitute the substance of Victorian Literature and Culture

She starts by introducing the historical, cultural, and scientific developments of what is normally considered three separate periods – early, high, and late Victorian society. The main theme to emerge is that of conflicting ideologies beneath what is often thought of as a rather smug and conservative society.

On the one hand there is an unshakeable belief in progress and Britain’s supremacy based on notions of Christian predestination, on the other a critical analysis of the nation’s conflicts, shortcomings, and its failure to remove social inequality.

It’s a pity the book isn’t illustrated, because her analyses of famous paintings (The Stag at Bay, The Monarch of the Glen) demonstrate well how art works with one ostensible purpose and can carry additional meanings which may not be apparent to the first time viewer.

While she deals with all the major writers and artists as you might expect (the Brontes, the Brownings, Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Hardy, Rossetti, Shaw, Swinburne, Tennyson and Wilde) it is interesting to note her inclusion of the best-sellers of the Victorian age – Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere and Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Radcliffe. She also demonstrates the importance of the establishment of the circulating library which simultaneously established both best-sellers and a type of informal censorship.

She is particularly good at explaining the religious controversies of the period, and it struck me that any young student reading in 2007 is likely to be quite surprised if not shocked by the amount of anti-Catholicism that the orthodox Protestant church promoted.

The second part of the book presents what was probably something of a challenge to the author – for she sets out to cover all the main literary titles in poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fictional prose. This could easily have become not much more than a shopping list – had she not split the materials into recognisable sub-topics: the lyric poem, the dramatic monologue, the ‘condition of England novel’ and so on.

She has something of a problem with Victorian drama, for it is not until the late years of the era that G.B.Shaw and Oscar Wilde came along to provide any substance. The incidence and influence of non-fictional prose is covered in writers such as John Ruskin, J.S.Mill, Henry Mayhew, Harriet Martineau, and Thomas Carlyle.

I found her explanation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the Aesthetic and Decadent movements very helpful – because I have never quite understood what held together these movements comprising both writers and painters.

So – if you are doing A level literature, studying as an undergraduate, or a general reader who wants to know more about nineteenth century English literature, this will point you in the right direction. The further resources alone offer a timeline of major events, a glossary of key terms, bibliographies of further reading, and a list of scholarly references that should keep you busy for years.

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Maureen Moran, Victorian Literature and Culture, London: Continuum, 2006, pp.184, ISBN: 0826488846

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What Good are the Arts?

June 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a bracing and polemical look at theories of art

The chapter titles of John Carey’s book on art theory make his sceptical position quite clear. ‘What is a work of art?’, ‘Is ‘high’ art superior?’, ‘Do the arts make us better?’, ‘Can art be a religion?’. He is taking a radical perspective on claims that are traditionally made for the appreciation of art. And his answers to those questions (in order) are – Art can be anything people claim it is – No, ‘high’ art is not necessarily superior – No, there is no evidence it makes us better – and Yes, unfortunately, art is sometimes seen as a form of religion. He asks challenging questions and raises points some readers might find quite difficult to take on board.

For instance, on the issue that the appreciation of art is capable of inducing feelings of transcendent ecstasy, he points out that such states of mind can be perceived as essentially complacent and selfish, since they are customarily associated with a feeling of harmony and oneness with the world. In a world where a huge part of its population is living in starvation and misery, this is hardly a desirable state of being and certainly not one which can claim to be ethically superior.

He manages some of his arguments by slightly devious means. For instance in attacking Kant’s absolutist values he claims that aesthetics were ‘invented’ in the eighteenth century – conveniently omitting Aristotle’s Poetics which he clearly knows about, because he mentions them in a later chapter.

It’s a very amusing read, because he takes an ironic and dismissive attitude to the snobs and the vainglorious commentators on art, including some celebrated figures whose bogus ideas he is debunking. Nobody is spared: lots of Big Names are dealt with by almost summary execution – Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer – all ‘essentialists’ who believed that great works of art had something unreachable and transcendent which lesser works did not. But they couldn’t ever prove it.

His assessment of the American art collector John Paul Getty is typical. Pointing out that Getty’s personal opinions included support for eugenic engineering and capital punishment, he observes:

Viewed as a humanising influence, the Getty art collection was admittedly a failure insofar as it affected its owner … There is little point in acquiring two Rembrandts and a Rubens if your social views remain indistinguishable from those of any saloon-bar fascist.

You’ll have to hold on to your intellectual hat when he gets round to extolling Adolf Hitler’s interest in painting , architecture, and music – but it’s only to argue that Western culture can easily co-exist with barbarity when it is elevated to a form of quasi-religious belief.

He does skip around somewhat between painting, literature, music, and other forms of traditional art – but ultimately nails his colours to the mast in the second half of the book when he defends literature. He does so on the grounds that unlike the other arts it is self-reflective. That is, it can criticise itself, and offer multiple moral perspectives. Indeed, it demands more of participants than the other arts, because it must be interpreted through the act of reading.

He even celebrates its indistinctiveness, which accounts for so many possible interpretations – which then come out and compete with each other for acceptance. All this is illustrated by close readings from novels and poetry straight from the traditional English Literature curriculum.

When it first came out, this book upset a lot of people with an interest in maintaining ‘essentialist’ positions. So he even indulges himself with a postscript in which he replies to all the reviewers who took offence – saving his most withering remarks for the likes of the self-aggrandising ‘religion of art’ supporter Jeanette Winterson.

It’s a very invigorating and entertaining read. And it’s likely to make most people think twice about the claims they make for the art they like. I hope he follows this up with a book on modern literary criticism.

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John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, pp.296, ISBN 0571226035

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Literary Studies

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pride and prejudice: literary modernists 1880-1939

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historical context + survey of all literary genres

a bracing and polemical look at theories of art

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