Literature

biography, literary studies and criticism, the short story

biography, literary studies and criticism, the short story

Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

illustrated encyclopedia of writers and places

Writers in Britain (no less than those in any other part of the world) have often been influenced by the localities in which the have been born and grown up. There are whole mythologies built around the Brontes and Yorkshire, Thomas Hardy and the West Country, Charles Dickens and London. But the influence actually goes further back than that. For instance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people from all over Europe flocked to Scotland, inspired by the writing of Walter Scott.

Wordsworth and his friends almost single-handedly created a passion for the English Lake District which continues to this day. People queue up to peep into Dove Cottage, then go back home to houses ten times the size. Jane Austen has her own museum in Bath, because she captured the city so well in her work, even though she only spent a brief period of her short life there. But these are the well known examples. Less well known but just as interesting socially and geographically are the names listed in this encyclopedia of literature and place which explains connections between writers and locations from the smallest villages via towns and cities, to palaces and country seats which are like separate worlds of their own.

The other interesting factor here is that entries take a historical view of places – so that the record stretches well back beyond the recent past. And it also includes writers who were well known in their own day, even though they might not be now.

So, whilst you get pages of information about Shakespeare and Stratford on Avon (for obvious reasons) the entry on my own home city of Manchester includes Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Burgess (both fairly well known) but also the less well known Thomas de Quincy, Harrison Ainsworth, Howard Spring, George Gissing, and even Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, who lived here for a while.

I was even more interested to read the details of an entry concerning Christopher Isherwood and his connections with the now defunct Marple Hall in Cheshire. His much neglected – and in my opinion his best – novel The Memorial (1932) is set there. He inherited the hall, but gave it away to his brother.

There are all sorts of unexpected informational gems – such as the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Southport; Henry James wrote The Spoils of Poynton in Torquay; and Vladimir Nabokov lived in Trinity College, Cambridge. Entries range from Adelstrop and Abingdon to Wormwood Scrubs and Zennor – famous for having expelled D.H.Lawrence during the First World War on suspicion that he was a German spy.

It’s packed with little gems like that, and the nice thing is that although the big names are not neglected, the smaller, the second.rate, and the also-rans are listed too – and this makes it a work of fairly serious reference rather than just a coffee-table guide. And with two indexes, you can look up either authors or places you might plan to visit. It’s the sort of book that reinforces the idea that people from all over the world probably regard Britain as a nation of writers and poets.

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Daniel Hahn and Nicholas Robins, The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press, third revised edition 2008, pp.370, ISBN: 0198614608

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How Novels Work

July 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

novelists’ techniques – and contemporary fiction

Literary Theory of the academic kind led itself into a one-way, dead-end street in the latter decades of the last century. But traditional literary criticism has survived, largely because it preserved a connection with common sense; it didn’t take itself too seriously; and it was more interested in literature than theory. John Mullan’s guide to understanding novels How Novels Work belongs to this humanist tradition. It’s based on articles he wrote for the cultural supplement to the Guardian. He seeks to examine how novels work by looking at examples of contemporary fiction whilst keeping in mind what we already know about classics.

He does this by focusing on some of the most fundamental parts of the novel – its title for instance, how its story is told, its characters created, its style, and even how it ends. One of the clever parts of his approach is that he situates his analyses within an account of the story. So even if you haven’t read some of the recent Booker prizewinners he uses as his source materials, he tells you enough to make his point comprehensible. And en passant he delivers some really good appetite-whetting accounts of contemporary best-sellers – from Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, and Ian McEwan.

The Guardian articles were originally written with people in book-reading circles in mind – and they are just the sort of readers who could profit from this introductory approach to the analysis of literature and how it achieves its effects. Others include students in schools, colleges, and universities, plus general readers of novels who would like a guided tour of the literary engine room to be shown how it all works.

Such readers will find helpful his explanations of first and third person narratives, unreliable narrators, point of view, and the conventions that surround them. And he moves fluently from Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre to contemporary novels such as Nick Hornby’s How to be Good and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth without any strain or condescension.

Of course you’re not likely to agree with every one of his interpretations. For instance, I think he credits Philip Roth with clever manipulation of author-narrator distinctions which are no more than modish self-referentiality, weak writing, and self-indulgence. But that is the nature of literary interpretation. These things are up for debate.

He has a particularly good section which discusses the distinctions to be made between story, narrative, structure, and plot. And the examples he chooses are fascinating. Indeed, half way through reading the chapter I dashed out to buy all Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, he made the account of their split narratives so interesting.

All sorts of literary and rhetorical devices are examined: diction, parenthesis, hyperbole, pastiche, stream of consciousness, letters, emails, newspaper articles, coincidence, epigrams, quotations, symbolism – and so on. I read the book straight through, but it could equally well suffice as a work of reference.

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John Mullan, How Novels Work, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.368, ISBN: 0199281785

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Hyper/Text/Theory

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature and literary theory in the digital age

George Landow was amongst the early few to spot the similarities between modern literary theory and the technological possibilities of hypertext programmes. This is the third of his publications which explore connexions between them. The general argument he makes is that the digitization of text coupled with the associative links of hypertext represents a development of revolutionary potential.

It makes new literary forms available, blurs distinctions between existing genres [‘boundary erasure’] and makes possible anything from multimedia compilations started by authors but completed by their readers, to texts which are ‘unreproducible’ because of their size and their constant revision.

His introductory essay is an invigorating mixture of reports on hypertext projects and visionary ideas of the kind promoted by Jay Bolter and Nicholas Negroponte. Unfortunately, his fellow contributors fail to match his standard. The other essays deal with non-linearity as one of the essential features of hypertext, the politics of this branch of IT, and what promotes itself as new writing – ‘hypertext fiction’, a somewhat dubious notion over which there is still much debate.

They range enthusiastically over topics as diverse as Wittgenstein’s notebooks, films and narratology, and forms of classical rhetoric. But much of their exposition is clogged with silly jargon [‘texton’, ‘scripton’, ‘screener’] which is depressingly rife amidst professionals in the field of cultural studies.

At their worst the essays deal in speculation rather than reporting
on practical experiences or successful projects. Mireille Rosello for instance at one point drops to the level of conceptual art when she spends two or three pages describing what an imaginary hypertext programme could be like. Since there are unsung technical writers out there in the field constructing hypertext programmes for real right now, this is a feeble and self-indulgent substitute. There are just too many questions raised, not enough empirical data or answers.

One further dispiriting feature is the tendency of the authors to draw on the same material, and even worse to quote each other. It is one thing for them to [quite understandably] cite Ted Nelson as a hypertext visionary, but when yet another reference to Thomas Pynchon occurs in the fourth or fifth essay, one wonders if these aren’t the papers of some post-graduate club. This suspicion is reinforced by the tendency for them all to quote from the same fashionable cultural theorists – Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. The collection ends with a piece of post-Modernist tosh by Gregory L Ulmar which weaves a tissue of non-sequiturs around a contrived verbal connection between Wittgenstein [again] and Carmen Miranda.

In Landow’s own survey of current programmes and projects [written, one supposes, circa 1993/94] it is interesting to note how often he describes the hypertext systems available by using the telling metaphor of a ‘web’ of connexions. The World Wide Web which was under development at that very time now makes available many of the linkages dreamed of from Vannevar Bush onwards. And most importantly, they are available not merely for some technological elite as in the past, but for whoever wishes to use them. This is a democratizing influence which will have a profound effect upon the construction, assembly, and cross-linking of information – and Landow knows it. One of the driving forces behind this collection of essays is to make these possibilities known. I imagine that a further post-WWW volume is on its way right now – but I hope he writes the book himself.

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George P. Landow, (ed) Hyper/Text/Theory, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp.379, ISBN: 0801848385

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Hypertext in Hypertext

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

hypertext essays on literature and literary theory

This is a two-disk hypertext version of Landow’s 1992 print publication, Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. For those who are not acquainted with the original, Landow sets out a case for hypertext which looks at issues of textual authority, intellectual ownership, and the philosophy of a writing which can never be ‘finished’.

He notes the similarities between the new technology and contemporary critical theory which seeks to undermine the authority of texts and authors. So what’s new in the electronic version? Well, Landow has included many of the texts from which he quotes in the earlier printed book. There are also essays on Barthes, Bhaktin, and Foucault. He includes reviews of the original book, as well as some (typically feeble) parodies by Malcolm Bradbury.

There are mini-essays from students explaining and often criticizing some of the arguments. Landow observed in the original version that hypertext was ripe for exploiting this all-inclusiveness, and he has been as good as his word by adding material which even undermines his own work in this way. This might be seen as a courageous move from someone who could easily have insisted on absolute textual authority. Alternatively, you could say that it reflects his impregnability in the academic hierarchy. Would someone without tenure dare risk such a venture?

Some material has been added for this hypertext edition. For instance, it includes the text of the original proposal to Johns Hopkins Press: “This project will include …” and so forth. But I’m not so sure that readers want to know about these details of the planning stage. It’s one thing to have the early drafts of “King Lear”, but presenting the outline plans for a book of cultural argument (even an interesting one) is another matter. We warn students against discussing the process of composing their essays. All that’s required is the finished product – not the means by which it arrived.

The bibliographical jump-links are good. This is technology which works more efficiently than a printed book. Strangely enough though, there are not as many notes or pop-up screens as one might expect. Perhaps this is because the basic text was conceived and executed in the Old Days of sequential writing?

What he has done is split the original into smaller sections – but they’re still not small enough. On my 17-inch monitor screen there are ‘pages’ which require so much scrolling that one craves for the start of a paragraph. The fact is that even with a knowledge of the original printed text, reading this version on screen is not easy. It’s difficult to keep any sense of structure in mind. This experience supports the notion that writing for screen and for print require quite different skills.

He argues fairly persuasively that Hypertext is useful in learning the
culture of a discipline, because we can switch easily from the principal text to supplementary readings of it:

hypertext materials provide the student with a means of experiencing the way an expert works in an individual discipline … such a body of electronically linked material also provides the student with an efficient means of learning the vocabulary, strategies, and other aspects of a discipline that constitute its particular culture

Anyone interested in the potential relationships between hypertext and cultural theory should try to see this program in action. It may well be that sustained and continuous arguments made in prose are not actually suitable for this format, but one can hardly blame him for trying out his theories. He could be a little more inventive with his titles, though, couldn’t he?

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George P. Landow, Hypertext in Hypertext, Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, ISBN: 0801848695 (Windows version) ISBN: 0801848709 (Mac version)

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Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence

July 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a case of wrongful critical conviction

During his lifetime, Philip Larkin, the self-effacing ‘Hermit of Hull’ (where he was the University Librarian), was held in public affection as an ‘accessible’ poet, minor novelist, and quirky jazz critic. His death in 1985 was mourned as the passing of – in W. H. Auden’s phrase – ‘a master of the English language’. But with the publication of his Selected Letters, edited by Anthony Thwaite (1992), and Andrew Motion’s biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), the tide began to turn.

Germaine Greer characterised Larkin’s verse as ‘anti-intellectual, racist, sexist, and rotten with class-consciousness’ while Tom Paulin condemned the Letters as a ‘revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals the sewer under the national monument that Larkin became’.

What Paulin and other commentators failed to understand was the fundamental distinction between private and public correspondence. Unless one is a compiler of the dreadful and usually seasonal round robin to friends and acquaintances, letters are written to individuals, and take into account their sensibilities. Larkin certainly knew this, yet a recent eBay auction listed Motion’s biography under the key words: ‘Homosexual Pornography Poet PHILIP LARKIN Nazi’.

John Osborne’s purpose in this adversarial and provocative polemic is to rescue Larkin from both his disciples and his detractors, who have combined and conflated the man with his work. As Osborne cautions, ‘a narrator of invented experiences is not to be confused with an actual author and real ones’.

Read correctly, neither Larkin’s poems nor his prose reveal an ‘anti-Modernist’, Little Englander, blinkered jazz lover, homophobe or racist bigot. On the contrary, he emerges as a magisterially informed, radical and subversive writer, fully conversant with and sympathetic to the plight of oppressed minorities – including African-Americans, immigrants and the white working classes.

In an excellent chapter on ‘Larkin and Modernism: Jazz’, Osborne contends that from its beginnings jazz, with its stylistic and creative innovations, was ‘Modernist music par excellence’ and was seen as such. But Larkin, because of his famous/notorious anti-modernist stance (‘Parker, Pound and Picasso’), liked to pretend that jazz stopped being ‘jazz’ with the bebop revolution of the 1940s. It didn’t, and he knew it.

Osborne also offers a brilliant (and persuasive) interpretation of the poem ‘For Sidney Bechet’ and also notes that Larkin’s other jazz hero was Louis Armstrong who, he suggested, was ‘certainly quite comparable’ in cultural stature with Pablo Picasso. So much for Larkin the private racist and public ‘anti-Modernist’.

Where the ‘pink professoriate’ and ‘self-appointed guardians of public morality’ – including Terry Eagleton, Lisa Jardine – have castigated Larkin as a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative, Osborne reminds us that the only poem he was commissioned to write by the Tory party (‘Going, Going’) was ‘so little to their liking that they brutally censored it before publication’.

Again, far from being unaware of working-class culture, Larkin identified (even if he did not identify with) its consumer novelties: ‘split-level shopping, transistors, deodorants, the Pill, Bri-Nylon, Baby-Doll nighties, the Beatles’ first LP’. In poems like ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, Osborne suggests, Larkin deconstructs the ‘discourse of modern advertising’ as profoundly as does the work of pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol.

Despite his myopic scholarly detractors, Larkin’s influence and reputation have been recognised by musicians, artists and creative writers. Leonard Bernstein nominated Larkin as the twentieth century’s greatest poet (Osborne views him as ‘the greatest poet of doubt since [Thomas] Hardy’). The paintings in Damien Hirst’s latest exhibition are all titled after a Larkin poem, while Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Julian Barnes have acknowledged his ‘liberating role’ in their work.

Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence deserves a wide readership. It sheds fresh light on his oeuvre and its sources, and, most importantly, sends one back to the poems (and prose) with sharpened perceptions.

Academic students of literature will also welcome the two chapters on ‘Larkin and Philosophy’. Only occasionally does Osborne lapse into the arcane jargon of the new literary criticism, as in his endorsement of Barbara Everett’s recognition of Larkin’s indebtedness to T.S. Eliot. She, we are informed,

appreciates that this Eliotic citationality desiderates a text-centred rather then an author-centred methodology, the incorporation of elements by other hands generating a problematic of multiplicity, heterogeneity and exteriority that challenges the author’s sovereignty.

Larkin’s response to this intelligence might well have been: ‘In a pig’s arse, friend’. But he would surely have welcomed the aside that ‘The worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment in contemporary cinema or television (let alone the internet).’

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John Osborne, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 304, ISBN: 1403937060

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Late Victorian Gothic Tales

May 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

mystery, weirdness, supernatural, and horror

For reasons much debated amongst literary historians, there was a revival of the Gothic horror story at the end of the nineteenth century. Within the space of just a few years we have Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G.Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The horror story was also a popular ingredient of the popular mass-circulation magazines which were launched around this time. Robert Luckhurst’s collection Late Victorian Gothic Tales is drawn from these sources, and it aims to show the range of stories by mixing examples from well-established authors with no less chilling takes from lesser-known writers.

Henry James believed that a horror story should not rely on the traditional trappings of midnight spookiness in ruined abbeys and graveyards for its effect. He thought that the mysterious and the macabre we all the more effective for taking place in the full light of day. His story here – Sir Edmund Orme – has a ghost who appears on the Parade at Brighton on a sunny afternoon. And true to James’s ever-inventive spirit, even though the ghost is of somebody long ago dead (as a result of a gruesome suicide) it turns out to be a force for good. It is a ghost of ‘retributive justice’ which appears to check that an injustice is not repeated.

Oscar Wilde performs the miraculous feat of making a horror story funny. His Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime offers an amusing critique of palm-reading (Cheiromancy as it was known then) which was in vogue at the turn of the century. Lord Arthur singularly fails to act out his destiny, which is to commit murder, despite sending a poisoned bon-bon to Lady Clementina and an exploding clock to the dean of Chichester.

In what he himself described as an ‘unpleasant story’, Rudyard Kipling manages to combine drunkenness, torture, and a contemporary case of a man turning into a rabid animal under the curse of a leper. This was one of his earliest Plain Tales from the Hills which made him famous as an author of Empire.

Arthur Conan Doyle follows a similar pattern in both stories that represent his contribution to the supernatural – his personal belief in which actually contributed to a decline in his literary reputation He has one story of an oblique form of sexual mutilation, and another in which an Egyptian mummy attempts to murder a series of Oxford undergraduates.

What’s clear from this collection is that Gothic horror is a formula sufficiently adaptable to work effectively in any circumstances. Ruined castles, vampires, and coffins in subterranean vaults are not the real essentials. They might help create atmospheric effects, but the basics elements of horror remain existential anxieties – such as predestination, the burden of inheritance, fighting uncontrollable forces , and the threat of death.

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Roger Luckhurst (ed), Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.326, ISBN: 0199538875

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Letters to Monica

March 4, 2015 by Roy Johnson

poetry, academic gossip, sex, equivocation, and death

Philip Larkin first met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in the autumn of 1946 when they were both twenty-four. He was the newly appointed Assistant Librarian and she was a Lecturer in English. In 1950 he moved to Belfast, and then on to Hull, while she remained at Leicester. She started as a correspondent and friend, became his lover and confidante, and spent forty ears as his sometime muse and psychic nursemaid until his sudden death in 1985.

This is a selection from the almost two thousand letters he wrote to her – though he wrote double that number to his mother. Unfortunately, her side of the correspondence is embargoed in the Bodleian Library until 2035.

They were rather an oddly matched couple. He was shy, reserved, and socially very conservative. She was a flamboyant blonde who was given to wearing short skirts, fishnet tights (sometimes with holes) and high-heeled shoes. He was assiduous in his attitude to work (even though he didn’t like it): she on the other hand never published a word in her whole career as a university lecturer

The letters begin as Larkin, newly appointed as assistant librarian at Queens University Belfast, is seeking estimates for a privately printed edition of his poems. Given his later fame, this is a salutary lesson for any would-be writers. He also begins what was to become a long series of equivocations when setting up meetings with Monica.

They tested the temperature of the other’s enthusiasm from the tone and content of their letters. Yet his hesitation and contradictions regarding their planned assignations are amusingly reminiscent of Kafka. Timetables, routes, hotels, and dates are discussed in excruciating detail, potential excuses for a no-show are set up in advance, and penny-pinching attention to the cost are flagged up in a clear display of his ambivalence about the relationship.

Larkin’s complex romantic life is now quite well known, but what the letters reveal is very much a meeting of minds. They had similar literary tastes and similar isolationist tendencies – though the editor of this volume Anthony Thwaite puts it differently, saying that “e;they fed each other’s misery”e;.

Larkin comes across as breathtakingly pompous and arrogant when lecturing Monica on how she should modify her style of conversation – though it should be said that first-hand accounts report her as hectoring people in general, and paying no attention to what they said in reply – which were precisely his criticisms.

There are persistent complaints and self-criticism about his lack of productivity, and yet sadly thirty volumes of his personal diaries were destroyed after his death. The request was his own; it was enacted by Monica as his literary executor; and the journals were shredded in Hull library by his secretary.

There is an enormous amount of moaning, complaints about illnesses (real and imaginary), disgust at his own ineffectuality, and endless reasons for not getting married, which Monica was clearly expecting him to propose. Indecision and a stolid bachelor inertia dogged his every step. In one single letter he goes into a rage about the noise from a neighbour’s radio, then turns down the opportunity of renting a spacious flat because it would be too big and ‘No sound would ever have penetrated its walls’.

The year 1955 should have been a high point in his life: he had secured the job at Hull on a good salary (£1,500 pa) and the first volume of his poems was being published to some acclaim. Yet his letters are full of self-loathing and despair:

I do feel absolutely sick at heart, my blankness has been goaded into revulsion & I am up in arms again, sufficiently fed up to start moving [address] again, back at the point when not moving is worse than moving. And I can’t do anything, not now: I must endure the weekend, & all next week, & … This state of mind is different than my earlier howls: this is a kind of nausea, as if life were some milk-skin clinging to my lip. I don’t, at the moment, see how I am going to endure it, it’s all so frightful

This is the sort of volitional paralysis and neurasthenia (to say nothing of the hypochondria) which reinforces the comparison with Kafka – another literary bachelor who was riven by contradictions, moved from one set of rented lodgings to another, and agonized endlessly about his fear of marriage.

What makes the letters bearable and very entertaining amidst all the misery is their fluidity and inventiveness, his gossipy wit, adoption of comic personae, abrupt variations in register, his heterogeneous topics, and his cultivated intelligence.

Larkin is voracious in his reading and not at all snobbish in taste – everything from renaissance poetry to contemporary fiction. He championed Barbara Pym and helped to restore her reputation. His essential favourites are classics, and his enthusiastic notes on Bleak Housemake you feel like reading it again, as do his observations and deep feelings for Hardy’s poetry.

It’s easy to see why Monica was so exasperated by his failure to ‘commit’. When he was taken into hospital following a collapse, she rushed from Leicester to his bedside, yet he wouldn’t let her stay in his (empty) flat in case she read his diaries. And when she raised the question of money and inheritance, he claimed to have a phobia about making a will.

He makes hardly any effort to visit her – even though she lived only a few miles from his mother, who he visited regularly. Or he would ‘call in’ for just an hour on his way back from London. Even when he had two sabbatical terms as a fellow at All Souls Oxford, he found all sorts of reasons not to make the make the short journey up to Leicester, including not wishing to drive at night.

There is quite an excruciating series of letters in 1964 and 1965 where he tries to wish away her wounded feelings when she found out about his parallel affair with Maeve Brennan, a colleague in the Library at Hull. He admits his culpability, but doesn’t feel he can do anything about it, and admits he would be ‘shattered’ if she were to do the same from her independent base in Leicester. It’s perhaps as well that Monica never seems to have realised at the time that there was a ‘third woman’ with whom he shared sexual comforts – his matronly secretary Betty Mackereth.

Later in their tortured lives, the tensions between them were eased somewhat by the arrival of ill health. Monica fell downstairs, then afterwards developed shingles. Larkin took her into his house and looked after her, finally acknowledging that they were a ‘couple’. He made her his literary executor, then following his own sudden demise, Monica stayed living in the house until her own death in 2001.

He was an amazingly acute observer and a sound judge of character. One of Monica’s favourite students (and would-be swain) went on to become a lecturer at Manchester University, where he was renowned for his idleness. Larkin pins him down in a single sentence: “e;[he] will will get on up to a point – the point at which has to do some work”e;. This makes his sketch of F.R.Leavis (then at the height of his fame) all the more amusing:

Well, Leavis … what a ghastly little man! … one of the bores of the century, I’d say — and really a typical Oxbridge don, cocky, smart, full of petty cattiness. Oh dear. And what a bore. ‘I live on my nerves’, he told me .. I don’t wonder that Cambridge, or Downing, can’t stand him at any price … I’ve never met a man so full of himself. Stupid little sod, the ideas rattling in him like peas. No, a typical don, one who likes being a don … I’ve not met a sillier man for many a long day … I’m awfully glad to reflect that I don’t possess a single book by him. Not a single book.

These are a very welcome addition to the successful volume Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, and they seem to cry out for a future collection in which Larkin’s letters are placed alongside those written in reply by Monica Jones. But we will have to be very patient: her correspondence is locked in the Bodleian Library for the next twenty years.

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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Letters to Monica, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. 475, ISBN: 0571239102

Literary Criticism – a new history

September 7, 2010 by Roy Johnson

aesthetic theory from the classical period to the present

Gary Day’s main argument in his impressive study Literary Criticism – a new history is that literary criticism is like a pendulum that swings backwards and forwards in different historical epochs. At one moment it emphasizes the text, and at the next its effect upon the reader. He traces all the main schools of literary criticism, starting with classical Greek and Roman writing on aesthetics, and he shows that many of the notions people imagine to be new have actually been around for two thousand years or more. This makes his book a good antidote to the mistaken idea that literary criticism began in the 1970s with the discovery of French structuralism.

He takes the history of both literature and literary criticism through the distinct phases of its historical development, starting with the classics, then looking successively at Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, and Modern phases. His emphasis on the whole is on English criticism, though it does not preclude an occasional consideration of other cultures.

His examination of criticism relating to the earlier periods has the instructive effect of condensing their ideas and ‘theory’ into digestible chunks. He points out that in the medieval period for instance there was no concept of either literature or criticism as we know them – only ‘commentary’ on sacred texts. The Greco-Roman classics for instance were interpreted as guides to (Christian) moral behaviour. The medieval period also gave rise to the concept of the auctor (author). It also saw, towards its end, the rise of the written vernacular. Latin was the language of learning, but as trade between nations increased there was more reason than ever for people to use and learn each other’s native language.

In the Renaissance period Day argues that a crucial issue was the Protestant-inspired translation of the Bible into English. This gave the common man both access to divine scripture and the right to its interpretation – previously only in the remit of the church itself. The introduction of printing and the establishment of a vernacular English that pushed out Latin and French as the lingua francas of official discourse led to the publication of books for readers’ pleasure. This in turn gave rise to a literature of the popular marketplace and a need to make distinctions between such products and a canon of revered classics. It is easy to see the point that Gary Day makes several times throughout this study – that many of the critical issues debated with such recent ferocity were evident in literary history centuries ago.

His chapter on the English Enlightenment draws interesting parallels between criticism and finance. If the intrinsic value of a paper five pound note was certainly not five pounds, because there was not a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, so the value of a work of literature could not be determined by the accuracy of its correspondence with some value in the real world.

There is a strong period of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century that Day attributes to a desire for order, proportion, and rule-based authority after the uncertainties created by the Civil War. However, he argues that it failed to take permanent root and only sprang back into life now and again during politically reactionary phases.

In his chapter on the Romantic period he argues that the cult of individualism, ‘sensibility’, and nature was a reaction to the industrial revolution which reduced man to a mere part in the economy of mass production. Thus the literary criticism that emerged emphasized the possibilities of individual response to and interpretation of a text. This tendency reached its apogee in the art for art’s sake movement at the end of the nineteenth century when all connections between art and moral improvement were finally denied completely.

When it comes to the twentieth century he understandably sees Freud, Max Plank and Picasso as exemplars of revolutionary thinking, though the literary critics he first considers are the very unfashionable Walter Orage and G.K. Chesterton. But in fact the main focus of interest in his final chapter is the establishment of English Studies in the UK university system – a surprising phenomenon both in its recency and the controversy that surrounded it.

Fortunately, he does finish by looking at three major figures critics who were influential from the mid-century onwards – I.A.Richards, William Empson, and F.R.Leavis. He explains their critical methods and their significance, and finally lets himself off the leash to take a few well-aimed swipes at Catherine Belsey, who is obviously his bete noir.

This is not simply gratuitous rival-bashing however, for one of Day’s habits that I found quite entertaining was his demonstrating links between debates held centuries ago with those of the last two or three decades – to show that there is very little that is totally new under the sun. And he is also much given to taking pot shots at the current academic culture of ‘skills’ and ‘performance indicators’ that have come to replace a serious interest in the subject of literature and literary criticism.

He has very little to say about contemporary forms of literary criticism which range from feminism, postcolonialism, post-Modernism, and queer theory – except to conclude somewhat radically that

the sheer variety should not distract us from one fundamental truth: that the demands of bodies like the Quality Assurance Agency are making the study of literature ever more prescriptive for students while the Research Assessment Exercise has distorted it for academics. Criticism is better off outside the academy.

This sort of writing could signal the beginnings of a long overdue and very welcome change in the practice of academic literary criticism.

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Gary Day, Literary Criticism: a new history, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.344, ISBN: 0748641424

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Literary Theory: a short introduction

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

brief guide to critical approaches to literary studies

This introductory guide to literary theory comes from a new series by Oxford University Press. They are written by specialists, aimed at the common reader, and offer an introduction to the main cultural and philosophical ideas which have shaped the western world. Jonathan Culler avoids the common approach of explaining the various schools of literary criticism by choosing instead a set of topics and showing what various literary theories have to say about them.

There’s a certain amount of sleight of hand. In explaining ‘theory’ in its modern sense he doesn’t acknowledge the profound difference between this loose use of the term and a scientific theory, which can be proven or disproven. Nor does he acknowledge the sort of special pleading and self justification which is passed off as ‘philosophy’ in the work of someone such as Michel Foucault. But he does have a persuasive way of explaining some of these difficult ideas in terms which the common reader can understand.

The topics he chooses turn out to be very fundamental questions such as ‘What is literature?’ – that is, are there any essential differences between a literary and a non-literary text. These are questions to which common sense supplies rapid answers, but when Theory is applied, unforeseen complexities arise.

In fact when he looks more closely at the nature, purpose, and the conventions of literature, he claims that one of the purposes of Theory is to expose the shortcomings of common sense.

There’s an interesting chapter on language and linguistic approaches to literary theory where he discusses Saussure and Chomsky, the differences between poetics and hermeneutics, and reader-response criticism. Any one of these approaches is now the basis for a whole school of literary theory.

When he gets to genre criticism there’s a useful explanation of lyric, epic, and drama – though it’s not quite clear why he separates narrative (stories and novels) into a chapter of its own.

However, when it does come, his explanation of narrative theory is excellent. His account of plot, point of view, focalisation, and narrative reliability will help anyone who wants to get to grips with the analysis of fiction.

He ends with brief notes explaining the various school of literary theory which have emerged in the recent past – from New Criticism, through Structuralism, Marxism, and Deconstruction, to the latest fashions of Post-Colonialism and Queer Theory.

In one sense the book’s title is slightly misleading. It should be Modern Literary Theory. But this is a very interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index.

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Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.149, ISBN: 019285383X

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Literary Theory: the basics

May 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

schools of literary criticism 1900-2000 explained

Despite its title, this is a survey of modern literary criticism. Hans Bertens starts from a critique of Matthew Arnold’s liberal humanist and essentially romantic appeal that literature exists on a higher spiritual plane that we are invited to visit. He then goes on to show the links with T.S.Eliot, Ivor Richards, F.R.Leavis, and the New Criticism of the United States in the early decades of the last century. Then its on to the Russian formalists and Prague structuralism – Shklovsky, Propp, and Jakobson .

These progress by a slightly dog-legged chronology to the French structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s. Roland Barthes picks up Saussure and runs with the ball of structuralism. Genette develops the same lines in his theories of narratology. When it came to Marxism I had a minor quibble with his account of ideology and I think he lets Georgy Lukacs off rather lightly – but on the whole it’s an even-handed treatment.

I enjoyed his explanations of feminism, race, and gender theory, and I couldn’t help feeling that his own interests were transmitted more infectiously as his story approached the present. What a rich choice of approaches any young student of literature has today.

When he arrives at the ‘poststructuralist revolution’ you have to be prepared for an excursion into the realms of philosophy. Literature seems a long way off, but you’ll get an account of Derrida which makes him seem almost accessible. The same is true of his chapter on Lacan

We know now that the deconstructionists took literary theory to a point where it appeared that nothing certain could be said about a text. So what happened afterwards? Well – it’s interesting that the fashions in literary theory which followed tend to focus upon on a single topic – race, class, sexuality, colonialism, or gender, and erect a series of abstact generalisations upon it.

Bertens gives very generous considerations to these late twentieth-century developments. The strength of this approach is that the theories are explained very well. The weakness is that we don’t get to see them applied. Literary texts themselves seem a long way off, and only get the occasional mention. It’s really difficult to see what ‘queer theory’ can tell us about Bleak House or The Odyssey. Go on – prove me wrong.

Nevertheless, I think this is a book worth recommending to people embarking on literary studies at undergraduate level, if for no other reason than it gives a reasonable account of what these theories claim without shirking from their weaknesses. And as he points out, although the latest of them tend to claim the intellectual high ground, their predecessors are still in general circulation.

Each separate chapter is followed by an annotated bibliography of further reading. I mention the annotation because this makes it far more useful to the reader than the long bare listings you usually find in books of this kind.

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Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics, Abingdon: Routledge, 2nd edition 2007, pp.264, ISBN: 0415396719

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