Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

  • HOME
  • REVIEWS
  • TUTORIALS
  • HOW-TO
  • CONTACT
>> Home / Archives for Theory

Print Culture bibliography

October 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Print Culture bibliography

Abdurgham, Alison. Women in Print: Writing and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria. London: Allen & Unwin, 1972.

Altick, Richard Daniel. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. 2nd ed. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998.

Armbruster, Carol, ed. Publishing and Readership in Revolutionary France and America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Anderson, Benedict R. O’Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991.

Anderson, Patricia. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1991.

Armstrong, Adrian. Technique and Technology: Script, Print, and Poetics in France 1470-1550. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Barker, Hannah and David Vincent. Language, Print, and Electoral Politics, 1790-1832: Newcastle-under-Lyme Broadsides. Rochester, NY: Boydell P/Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust, 2001.

Baron, Naomi S. Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading. London: Routledge, 2000.

Barton, David and Nigel Hall, eds. Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000.

Bazerman. Charles. The Languages of Edison’s Light. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1999.

—. Shaping Written Knowledge. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.

Bell, William, Laurel Brake, and David Finkelstein, eds. Nineteenth-Century and the Construction of Identities. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000.

Besnier, Niko. Literacy, Emotion, and Authority. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Winchester, MA: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Blaney, Peter W. M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, DC: Folger Library Publications, 1991.

Bobrick, Benson. Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. 2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp.295, 1999.

Borgmann, Albert. Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Burke, Sean, ed. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995.

Cadman, Eileen, Gail Chester, and Agnes Pivot. Rolling Our Own: Women as Printers, Publishers and Distributors. London: Minority P Group, 1981.

Carlson, David R. English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993.

Cavallo, Guglielmo and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of Reading in the West. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Chambers, Douglas. The Reinvention of the World: English Writing 1650-1750. London: Arnold/Hodder Headline Group, 1996.

Chambers, Douglas. The Reinvention of the World: English Writing 1650-1750. London: Arnold/Hodder Headline Group, 1996.

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.

—, ed. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

—. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.

Chaytor, H. J. From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature. London: W. Heffer and Sons, 1945.

Crain, Patricia A. The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

Crosby, Alfred W. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Cuddihy, John Murray. The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon P, 1987.

Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York: Norton, 1995.

Darnton, Robert and Daniel Roche. Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

DeRitter, Jones. The Embodiment of Characters: The Representation of Physical Experiences on Stage and in Print, 1728-1749. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994.

Dock, Julie Bates. The Press of Ideas: Readings for Writers on Print Culture and the Information Age. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s P, 1996.

Dolan, Frances E. Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.

Eberly, Rosa A. Citizens Critics: Literary Public Spheres. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1992.

—. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1979.

Eliot, Simon. Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800-1919. London: Bibliographical Society, 1994.

Elsky, Martin. Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Farrell, Thomas J. Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2000.

Febvre, Lucien Paul Victor and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton. London: Verso, 1997.

Ford, Worthington Chauncey. The Boston Book Market, 1679-1700. New York: Burt Franklin, 1972. Reprint of 1917 ed.

Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Frasca-Spada, Marina and Nicholas Jardine, eds. Books and the Sciences in History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Freedman, Joseph S. Philosophy and the Arts in Central Europe, 1500-1700: Teaching and Texts in Schools and Universities. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999.

Fuller, Mary C. Voyages in Print: English Travel to America 1576-1624. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Gilmartin, Kevin. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

Goggin, Maureen Daly, ed. Inventing a Discipline: Rhetoric Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Young. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.

Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1986.

—. The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution P, 2000.

Graff, Harvey J. The Labryrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past and Present. Rev. ed. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.

—. The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

—. Literacy in History: An Interdisciplinary Research Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1981.

—. The Literacy Myth: Cultural Integration and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City. New York: Academic P, 1979.

—, ed. Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader. New York: Cambridge UP, 1981.

Grafton, Anthony, April Shelford, and Nancy G. Siraisi. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1992.

Gray, Floyd. Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Green, Ian. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.

Greetham, D. C. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 1992. Includes extensive bibliography.

Gronbeck, Bruce E., Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup, eds. Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong’s Thought. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1991.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1989.

Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Hart, James David. The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste. New York: Oxford UP, 1950.

Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.

Hayes, Kevin J. Poe and the Printed Word. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Headrick, Daniel R. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

Hindman, Sandra L., ed. Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, circa 1450-1520. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

Hobart, Michael E. and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

Howard-Hill, T. H. British Literary Bibliography and Textual Criticism, 1890-1969. Volume 6 of and index to British Literary Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1980.

Isaac, Peter and Barry McKay, eds. The Mighty Engine: The Printing Press and Its Impact. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll P, 2000.

Ivins, William. Prints and Visual Communication. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1953.

Jagodzinski, Cecile M. Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England. Charlottesville: UP of Virgina, 1999.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997.

Jordan, John O. and Robert L. Patten, eds. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Kaestle, Carl F., Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and William Vance Trollinger, Jr. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Kaufer, David S. and Kathleen M. Carley. Communication at a Distance: The Influence of Print on Sociocultural Organization and Change. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.

Keller-Cohen, Deborah, ed. Literacy: Interdisciplinary Conversations. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 1994.

Kernan, Alvin. Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Kilgour, Frederick G. The Evolution of the Book. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Kintgen, Eugene R. Reading in Tudor England. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1996.

Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Kramnick, Jonathan Brody. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Culture of the Past, 1700-1770. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

—. Literacy and the Survival of Humanism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

Laspina, James Andrew. The Visual Turn and the Transformation of the Textbook. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998.

Leith, Philip. Formalism in AI and Computer Science. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood, 1990.

Logan, Robert. The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow, 1986.

—. The Sixth Language: Learning & Living in the Internet Age. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 2000..

Love, Harold. The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998.

Luke, Carmen. Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism: The Discourse on Childhood. Albany: State U of New York P, 1989.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.

Marotti, Arthur F. and Michael D. Bristol, eds. Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relationships of the Media in Early Modern England. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2000.

Martin, Henri-Jean, The History and Power of Writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, trns. Lynda G. Cochrane, pp.591, ISBN 0226508366

—. Print, Power, and People in Seventeenth-Century France. Trans. David Gerard. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993.

Mayer, Thomas F. and D. R. Woolf, eds. The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,1995.

Mazzio, Carla and Douglas Trevor, eds. Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 2000.

McGrath, Alister. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed aNation, a Language and a Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

McIntosh, Carey. The Evolution of English Prose: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998.

McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

—. Oral Culture, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand: The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington, NZ: Victoria UP, 1985.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962.

—. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Melendez, A. Gabriel. So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834-1958. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1997.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1939.

Milton, John. ‘A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic Conformed to the Method of Peter Ramus’. Ed. and Trans. Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger.Complete Prose Works of John Milton: Volume 8. Ed. Maurice Kelley. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. 206-407

Mitch, David F. The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.

Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

—. Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Founding of Harvard College. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1935.

—. Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1936.

Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1996. Also see Yeo; Rechtien.

Oliphant, Dave and Robin Bradford, eds. New Directions in Textual Studies. Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, U of Texas.

Ong, Walter J. The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge, 2002, pp.204, ISBN: 0415281294

—. Faith and Contexts. 4 vols. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992-1999; now distributed by Rowman & Littlefield.

—. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

—. ‘Literature, Written Transmission of.’ The New Catholic Encyclopedia. Ed. William J. McDonald. 15 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. Reprinted in An Ong Reader; Challenges for Further Inquiry.

—. An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, forthcoming.

—. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

—. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

—. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958.

—. Review of Butler’s The Origin of Printing in Europe. The Historical Bulletin 19 (Mar. 1941): 68.

—. Review of McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy. America 107 (Sept. 15, 1962): 743, 747. Reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry.

—. Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971.

Perkinson, Henry J. How Things Got Better: Speech, Writing, Printing, and Cultural Change. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995.

Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book 1480-1880: Print, Text and Performance in Europe. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Popkin, Jeremy D. The Press, Revolution, and Social Identities in France, 1830-1835. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001.

—. Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.

Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Radway, Janice A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.

Rechtien, John G. Thought Patterns: The Commonplace Book as Literary Form in Theological Controversy during the English Renaissance. Diss. St. Louis U, 1975. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1975.

Rhodes, Neil and Jonathan Sawday, eds. The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. London: Routledge, 2000.

Richardson, Brian. Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.

Schulte, Henry F. The Spanish Press, 1470-1966: Print, Power, and Politics. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1968.

Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Sharpe, Kevin. Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

Sharratt, Peter. ‘The Present State of Studies on Ramus.’ Studi francesi 47-48 (1972): 201-13.

—. ‘Ramus 2000.’ Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 18 (2000): 399-455.

—. ‘Recent Work on Peter Ramus (1970-1986).’ Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 5 (1987): 7-58.

Solomon, Harry M. The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996.

Spufford, Margaret. Small Books and Pleasant Histories. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982.

Stephens, Mitchell. The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Street, Brian V. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Sutherland, John A. Fiction and the Fiction Industry. London: Athlone, 1978.

—. Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1995.

Taylor, Mark C. and Esa Saarinen. Imagologies: Media Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1994.

Tebeaux, Elizabeth. The Emergence of a Tradition of Technical Writing in the English Renaissance, 1475-1640. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing, 1997.

Topham, Jonathan R. ‘Scientific Publishing and the Reading of Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources.’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 31 (2000): 559-612. Includes extensive bibliography.

Treglown, Jeremy and Bridget Bennett, eds. Grub Street and the Ivory Tower: Literary Journalism and Literary Scholarship from Fielding to the Internet. New York: Clarendon P of Oxford UP, 1998.

Ulmer, Gregory. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989.

Tyson, Gerald P. and Sylvia S. Wagonheim, eds. Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe. Newark: U of Delaware P/Associated U Presses, 1986.

Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957.

Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Weber, Harold M. Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1996.

Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1999.

Wheale, Nigel. Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain, 1590-1660. London: Routledge, 1999.

Williams, Gordon. Shakespeare, Sex and the Print Revolution. London: Athlone, 1996.

Woolf, Daniel. Reading History in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Wyss, Hilary E. Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2000.

Yeo, Richard. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Includes commonplace books.

Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

Ziff, Larzer. Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Zboray, Ronald J. and Mary Saracino Zboray. A Handbook for the Study of Book History in the United States. Washington, DC: Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2000; available from Oak Knoll Books. Includes extensive bibliography.


Reproduced with the permission of the author –

Thomas J. Farrell, Associate Professor, Department of Composition, University of Minnesota at Duluth; Duluth, MN 55812


Filed Under: 19C Literature, 20C Literature Tagged With: Bibliography, Cultural history, Print culture, Theory

Remediation: Understanding New Media

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new media – theoretical and practical studies

Jay Bolter is the author of Writing Space, one of the most important books on hypertext of the early 1990s. Here he continues with co-author Richard Grusin his theoretical and practical consideration of digitisation into the realm of ‘new media’: that is, computer graphics, streamed video, and virtual reality. He begins by looking at the ways in which various media – from Renaissance paintings to modern 3D digital images – have tried to render convincing images of the real world.

Remediation: Understanding New MediaThe first part of the book discusses the interesting distinctions to be made between immediacy and hypermediacy. Their definition of remediation is ‘the representation of one medium in another’ and they argue that this is ‘a defining characteristic of the new digital media’.

Their premise is that all new media take over and re-use existing media. Thus the Web grabs aspects of television and printed books. A good Web homepage presents all its most important information visible ‘above the fold’, in the same way as newspapers are designed.

This doesn’t prevent some of the ‘old’ media fighting back. So, for instance, television news programs begin to show separate ‘windows’ on screen – in a clear imitation of the multitasking environment of the computer monitor to which we are now all accustomed.

There’s some heavy-duty language to get through in this section – but the tone lightens in the second part of the book. This deals with studies of a dozen contemporary forms of digital media – computer games, virtual reality, digital art and photography, television, and the Web.

This includes an extended analysis of the game Myst, which is seen in terms of a remediation and critique of film. They chase the differences between photo-realistic painting and digital art all around the houses. It also includes an interesting analysis of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, of Disney theme parks, and of web cam sites.

The analysis does include some dubious assumptions – such as the idea that the difference between film and TV is that we watch films in public and television in private. The truth is that not many people go to the cinema any more, and lots of people watch television films with friends.

The last part of the book returns to a theoretical consideration of the effect of all this on the individual. We are taken into issues such as ‘gender problems in MUDs’ and what it is like in VR experience to be a molecule or virtual gorilla.

It might be hard work to read, but it’s stimulating stuff. There may be further theoretical questions posed on many of these issues – but anybody interested in the uses of new media will not wish to miss what Bolter and Grusin have to say about them.

© Roy Johnson 2000

New Media   Buy the book at Amazon UK

New Media   Buy the book at Amazon US


Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 2000, pp.295, ISBN: 0262522799


More on digital media
More on technology
More on theory


Filed Under: Media, Theory Tagged With: Jay Bolter, Media, New media, Remediation, Technology, Theory

Remix: The Copyright Wars

December 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid  Economy

Lawrence Lessig is a lecturer in law at Harvard University and a leading authority on copyright and intellectual property rights in the digital age. He helped to found the Creative Commons movement, and he’s a former member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. His works are a passionate defence of the rights of the individual to the creativity of the past, and a crusade against those forces which try to limit the free exchange of information. Remix: The Copyright Wars is his manifesto on the topic.

Copyright warsThis is the latest in a long line of books he has written in support of such causes – explaining in non-legal language the way in which human rights have been eroded by the vested interests of big business. Whilst upholding the right of all content originators to make a living from what they create, he believes that the current copyright laws restrict the free exchange of information. He also argues that all creativity builds on the creativity of the past, and it is modern technology which has democratised and speeded up the process.

In the past, you could own the ‘source code’ to Shakespeare’s works, but only printing press owners could make copies. Now, as soon as something becomes digitised, any kid in his back bedroom can copy at will. This has given rise to a panic over copyright, which he explores in some depth.

First of all he examines the ‘war against piracy’ in the American courts by a close inspection of the terms in which it is commonly pursued:

In my view, the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously. At least when the war is not about survival, the solution to an unwinnable war is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to achieve without war the ends that the war sought.

You would almost think he was talking about the Americans in Afghanistan – but no, this is the ‘copyright wars’.

He cites many examples where companies have paid out legal fees ten times greater than the lost revenue they were seeking to recoup.

He agrees with Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow that the Nay-sayers and prophets of doom on all this are wrong. The future is not likely to be an either/or choice between prohibition and control versus unbridled anarchy. It’s much more likely to be a creative symbiosis of past and future technologies.

He then addresses the central theme of the book – how much is it possible to quote from someone else’s work in a new work for private or public consumption? The rules and general practice are quite different, depending on the medium. With printed text it is a perfectly normal, accepted practice to quote from someone else’s work. In fact academic writing specifically requires a knowledge and accurate quotation of previous works in the same subject.

But use the same approach with audio recordings and you’ll end up with a solicitor’s ‘cease and desist’ letter from Sony or Decca. And his argument is that this restriction is a brake on both creativity and freedom of information.

On mixed media he also makes the very good point that the sort of well-edited video clips with over-dubbed sound tracks shown in TV political satire (and now on blogs) are more effective than long-winded essays taking 10,000 words to make the same point.

Most people today don’t even have time to read long articles. They get their information in much shorter chunks. As he puts it, very pithily – “text is today’s Latin”. It’s an extreme view, but you can see his point.

A propos of which, he also practices what he preaches. He developed a style of presentation which uses rapid display of short, memorable phrases or pictures. Here’s an example which takes a while to load, but is well worth the wait. It’s quite old now, but it demonstrates a technique of presentation which will not date: sound and text being used together for maximum effect.

One thing about his writing I found quite inspiring is that for every bold proposition he makes, he looks at the possible objections to it. (In fact a whole section of his web site is devoted to criticisms of his work.)

He makes a profound distinction between what he calls read-only (RO) and read-write (RW) culture. Both are important, but they have the difference that RO encourages passive reception, whereas RW encourages a written, that is a creative response. This leads him to argue for the enhanced value of all ‘writing’ – by which he means not only text, but the manipulation of other media, such as the audio and video files which are the stock-in-trade of the mashup artists.

His point is that these collage-type works are definitely not examples of parasitic imitation, and that in almost all cases they reveal a skilled appreciation of the medium.

The second part of the book is an investigation of eCommerce – conducted at a level just as radical and profound. He looks Google, Amazon, and Netflix as examples of businesses that have become successful by defying the normal laws of commerce. They allow other companies to share their information, and in Amazon’s case they even allow competitors onto their site. By doing this they make more money, and they control more of the field.

For the sake of those people who didn’t catch it first time round, he explains Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Principle. He then looks at the ‘sharing economies’ to which the Internet has given birth – the Open Source projects and the Wikipedias which exist on the voluntary efforts of volunteers.

Next he passes on to what he calls the ‘hybrid economies’ – companies such as Slashdot and Last.fm who offer a community but make money by advertising revenues. The subtle distinctions between these different models have to be handled carefully – otherwise sensibilities (and revenue streams) might be affected.

He looks at the ethical and practical conflicts between Old and New economies – those based on greed and naked competition, and those based in the ‘hybrid’ sector of sharing and cooperation. Eventually this takes us back to the issue of copyright, where he has some radical proposals for reform.

The first is that basically all genuinely amateur use of copyrighted material should be exempt from prosecution. It is pointless issuing legal writs against some kid sampling and posting on YouTube. The second is a suggestion that copyright is returned to its original status – a fourteen year term which is renewable if the owner so wishes.

Next comes a suggestion called ‘clear title’ – which means that the item being copyrighted needs to be clearly defined. Then comes the de-criminalisation of P2P file sharing, and the end of prosecuting sampling and mashups. As he suggests, supported by people in the pop music business, there is no evidence to prove that a sample or mashup detracts from sales of the original. All of these seem perfectly reasonable – though I suspect vested corporate interests would think otherwise.

This is a passionate and thought-provoking book on the ethics of copyright and creativity in an age of rapid technological change. It is radical, free-thinking, and a challenge to anyone participating in the digital world right now. Lawrence Lessig is a voice to take note of. But you’ll have to move fast. He seems to be in a permanent state of rapid development, and by the time you’ve read this, his latest book, he’ll have moved on elsewhere. If you go to his official site at lessig.org you’ll see what I mean.

Remix: The Copyright Wars   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Remix: The Copyright Wars   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, London: Penguin Books, 2008, pp.327, ISBN: 0143116134


More on eCommerce
More on media
More on publishing
More on technology


Filed Under: e-Commerce, Media, Open Sources Tagged With: Business, Copyright, e-Commerce, Media, Open Sources, Remix: the copyright wars, Theory

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?

Research Methods for English StudiesSome 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.

Research Methods for English Studies   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Research Methods for English Studies   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


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


More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: 19C Literature, 20C Literature, Literary Studies, Literature Tagged With: Academic writing, Literary studies, Research, Research Methods for English Studies, Theory

Roger Fry a biography

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

portrait of Bloomsbury’s art theorist by premier writer

This is one of the last books Virginia Woolf wrote, and it is a tribute from one artist to another, an account of Fry’s aesthetics, and one of her many excursions into biography. Actually, Roger Fry A Biography is almost a joint production, because much of the text is direct quotations from Fry’s own journals and his letters to friends. It starts with his family background of radical Quakers, a quite strict upbringing, and his interest in science and the natural world.

Roger Fry A Biography He was a studious youth who blossomed when he went to Cambridge and was elected to the semi-secret society of Apostles who were what would be called free-thinkers (and coincidentally formed the basis of what would later be the Bloomsbury Group). He was older than the other members of this group, and always held in high regard by them. Despite getting a first in science, he switched to the study of Art and travelled to Italy and France on a sort of autodidactic Grand Tour to bring himself into contact with the masters.

Apart from her obvious sympathy with his artistic ideas, Woolf’s approach is largely descriptive. There is little attempt at analysis of her material. And we have to put up with her reticence on personal matters to a a degree which is almost infuriating. As a young man Fry forms a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother, who teaches him ‘the art of love’, and they remain friends to the end of life. Yet this relationship is covered in less than a paragraph, and the woman isn’t even named.

Ever after Cambridge, his problem was how to earn a living from art, and even when he got married to fellow art-lover Helen Coombe, he was still living off an income from his father. But he found work as a lecturer, wrote art criticism, got nowhere as a painter, and was eventually employed by Pierpont Morgan to buy pictures for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Woolf makes a great deal of his organising the 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition which caused such a rumpus (and which she claimed changed human nature). She sees this as a turning point in Fry’s life, and yet the strange thing is that at the very point that he joins the Bloomsbury Group (and where she has first-hand knowledge of his relationships with its members) she remains annoyingly coy about his personal life.

You would not know from her account that he had an affair with her sister Vanessa Bell. His life as a human being is replaced by the artistic debates which raged about Post-Impressionism, Fry’s own artistic theories, and the foundation of the Omega workshops.

Lots of well-known figures flit across the pages – George Bernard Shaw, Elgar, Lytton Strachey, André Gide – but we are as remote from his personal life as ever. Even his late life affair with Helen Anrep is mentioned almost parenthetically – though he was to live with her for the rest of his life (whilst his wife died slowly from a brain disease in a Retreat at York).

You can see why Woolf found his critical theory interesting. He was searching for a synthesis which would embrace visual art and literature, and he was modest enough to admit that his aesthetic opinions were subjective and limited:

But agreeing that aesthetic apprehension is a pre-eminently spiritual function does not imply for me any connection with morals. In the first place the contemplation of Truth is` likewise a spiritual function but is I judge entirely a-moral. Indeed I should be inclined to deny to morals (proper) any spiritual quality—they are rather the mechanism of civil life—the rules by which life in groups can be rendered tolerable and are therefore only concerned directly with behaviours.

She writes very appreciatively of his book on Cezanne, his life in London and St Remy de Provence, and his search for an all-embracing critical theory. All his life he had sought official recognition but it was denied him time and time again. Finally, in 1933 he was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, but a year later he died.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Roger Fry biography Buy the book at Amazon UK

Roger Fry biography Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, London: Vintage, 2003, pp.314 ISBN: 0099442523


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group


Filed Under: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Individual designers, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury, Cultural history, Roger Fry, Theory, Virginia Woolf

Screen

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on graphic design, new media, and visual culture

Jessica Helfand is a critic of digital media and design matters. This collection of essays Screen first appeared in Eye, The New Republic, and Print Magazine. They deal with issues of visual design, digital culture, film, and media in general – including television, radio, and the Web. They are commendably short pieces, and it has to be said that they are elegantly written. Her formula is to take a single observation as a starting point, then spin it around with lots of cultural references to make gnomic statements about the state of culture in society.

ScreenThe problem is that they are basically personal opinions, and she very rarely examines concrete examples in any detail. This approach leads her into the marshy swamps of false generalisation. On our sense of space in a digital age, she claims:

The computer is our connection to the world. It is an information source, an entertainment device, a communications portal, a production tool … But we are also its prisoners: trapped in a medium in which visual expression must filter through a protocol of uncompromising programming scripts

Yes, it’s true that using computers requires mastery of complex techniques – but we are not its prisoners, because our sense of space is formed by many sources beyond the computer screen.

It’s obvious that she is well informed on digital technology. She discusses issues of web design, navigation buttons, splash screens, and the cultural significance of ‘rollovers’. Yet she confuses navigation with content, and even thinks that email has a homogenising effect:

In the land of email we all ‘sound’ alike: everyone writes in system fonts … Software protocols require that we title our mail, a leftover model from the days of interoffice correspondence, which makes even the most casual letter sound like a corporate memo.

That is simply not true. Anybody who receives more than a couple of dozen emails a day knows that most people generate their own ‘voice’ using this medium. And the titles of some of the messages I receive would certainly never make the ‘corporate memo’ file.

The fact is that there’s lot of techno-scepticism here. Underneath the glossy media guru carapace, she is actually digitally uncertain. Yet she’s not averse to patting herself on the back; she drops lots of Post-Modernist names, and at its most acute, her writing comes dangerously close to something from Pseud’s Corner. Encountering a consumer quiz on chicken nuggets, she reports

while I would like to report that my thoughts … drifted to Martin Heidegger or Giles Deleuze, to existentialism or metaphysics or even postmodernism, alas, they did not.

Fortunately, the collection is rescued by two excellent essays on the designer Paul Rand, where her analyses are much more meaningful because they are focused on concrete examples. The first is an analysis of his work as a commercial designer, and the second an interesting account of his methods as a teacher at Yale.

These two essays are first rate pieces of work. It’s a shame that the rest of the collection doesn’t match up. But having said that, the book comes larded with praise by other designers, and copies at my local bookshop have been flying off the shelves – so you will need to judge for yourself.

© Roy Johnson 2001

screen   Buy the book at Amazon UK

screen   Buy the book at Amazon US


Jessica Helfand, Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001, pp.175, ISBN: 1568983107


More on design
More on media
More on web design


Filed Under: Graphic design, Media, Theory Tagged With: Design, Media, Media theory, New media, Screen, Theory

Semiotics: the basics

June 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Semiotics is ‘the study of signs’ – but what constitutes a ‘sign’? Basically, it can be anything. Its significance will be determined by the context in which it appears and the way in which it is interpreted. The colour red can suggest passion, danger, or heat, depending on where it occurs and who perceives it. Daniel Chandler’s introduction to the subject explains the history and the various strands of the subject in everyday language, using up-to-date examples.

Semiotics: the basicsBasically, his account covers the development of these ideas from the nineteenth-century Swiss linguist Saussure, to post-modern cultural theorists of the present day. Semiotics is a subject which can hardly escape the dominance of language as the most developed system of signs. This is because language has what he calls ‘double articulation’. What this means is that small units (words) can be signs, but they can be combined indefinitely with each other to form other, bigger, or more complex signs. However, the theory leads effortlessly into considerations of linguistics, philosophy, and critical theory, as well as cultural media such as television, photography, literature, cinema, and even academic writing. This is in addition to the more obvious day-to-day sign systems of facial expressions, food, clothing, and social gestures.

His guidance through this multi-discipline maze is thoughtful and clear, and even though you have to be prepared to dip your toes into the waters of critical theory, he has a reassuring manner which makes it a pleasant intellectual experience.

I enjoyed his chapters on metaphor, irony, and codes – though a few more examples of how the theory could be applied would be useful. It would also be interesting to consider why something deprecated in one code (switching point of view in film, for instance) is permitted in another, such as narrative fiction.

However, he summarises his exposition with a useful chapter outlining the strengths and limitations of semiotics as an analytic tool. I was slightly surprised he didn’t include more comment on the Internet as a cultural medium, because this book has its origins as a well-established web site where he has been posting help for his students in the last few years.

Semiotic theory claims that it can reveal the codes and conventions shaping what we might otherwise think of as ‘natural’, which makes it a powerful tool for analysing all forms of culture and human communication. This an excellent basic introduction to the subject, with a good glossary, an index, and a list of further reading.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Semiotics   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Semiotics   Buy the book at Amazon US


Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics, London: Routledge, 2nd edition 2007, pp. 328, ISBN: 0415363756


More on digital media
More on technology
More on theory


Filed Under: Media, Theory Tagged With: Communication, Language, Media, Semiotics, Theory

The Art of Fiction – Henry James

June 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a famous critical essay on literary theory

[Published in Longman’s Magazine 4 (September 1884), and re-printed in Partial Portraits(1888). The Art of Fiction is the essay that Robert Louis Stevenson answers in his ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, published in the next number of Longman’s Magazine (December 1884)]

NB. The paragraphs really are that long!


I SHOULD not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks, necessarily wanting in any completeness, upon a subject the full consideration of which would carry us far, did I not seem to discover a pretext for my temerity in the interesting pamphlet lately published under this name by Mr. Walter Besant. Mr. Besant’s lecture at the Royal Institution-the original form of his pamphlet-appears to indicate that many persons are interested in the art of fiction and are not indifferent to such remarks as those who practise it may attempt to make about it. I am therefore anxious not to lose the benefit of this favourable association, and to edge in a few words under cover of the attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. There is something very encouraging in his having put into form certain of his ideas on the mystery of story-telling. It is a proof of life and curiosity-curiosity on the part of the brotherhood of novelists, as well as on the part of their readers. Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it-of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that; it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel, as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, naïf (if I may help myself out with another French word); and, evidently, if it is destined to suffer in any way for having lost its naïveté it has now an idea of making sure of the corresponding advantages During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that this was the end of it. But within a year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning animation-the era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened. Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of genius, are not times of development, are times possibly even, a little, of dulness. The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting; and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former, I suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are frank and sincere. Mr. Besant has set an excellent example in saying what he thinks, for his part, about the way in which fiction should be written, as well as about the way in which it should be published; for his view of the ‘art,’ carried on into an appendix, covers that too. Other labourers in the same field will doubtless take up the argument, they will give it the light of their experience, and the effect will surely be to make our interest in the novel a little more what it had for some time threatened to fail to be a serious, active, inquiring interest, under protection of which this delightful study may, in moments of confidence, venture to say a little more what it thinks of itself. It must take itself seriously for the public to take it so. The old superstition about fiction being ‘wicked’ has doubtless died out in England; but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed toward any story which does not more or less admit that it is only a joke. Even the most jocular novel feels in some degree the weight of the proscription that was formerly directed against literary levity; the jocularity does not always succeed in passing for gravity. It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a ‘make believe’ (for what else is a ‘story’?) shall be in some degree apologetic-shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to compete with life. This, of course, any sensible wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it, disguised in the form of generosity. The old Evangelical hostility to the novel, which was as explicit as it was narrow, and which regarded it as little less favourable to our immortal part than a stage-play, was in reality far less insulting. The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life. When it ceases to compete as the canvas of the painter competes, it will have arrived at a very strange pass. It is not expected of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven; and the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the different quality of the vehicle) is the same, their success is the same. They may learn from each other, they may explain and sustain each other. Their cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of another. Peculiarities of manner, of execution, that correspond on either side, exist in each of them and contribute to their development. The Mahometans think a picture an unholy thing, but it is a long time since any Christian did, and it is therefore the more odd that in the Christian mind the traces (dissimulated though they may be) of a suspicion of the sister art should linger to this day. The only effectual way to lay it to rest is to emphasize the analogy to which I just alluded-to insist on the fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give the novel. But history also is allowed to compete with life, as I say; it is not, any more than painting, expected to apologize. The subject-matter of fiction is stored up likewise in documents and records, and if it will not give itself away, as they say in California, it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian. Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he concedes to the reader that he and this trusting friend are only ‘making believe.’ He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime; it is what I mean by the attitude of apology, and it shocks me every whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay. It implies that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth than the historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke of all his standing-room. To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men, is the task of either writer, and the only difference that I can see is, in proportion as he succeeds, to the honour of the novelist, consisting as it does in his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from being purely literary. It seems to me to give him a great character, the fact that he has at once so much in common with the philosopher and the painter; this double analogy is a magnificent heritage. It is of all this evidently that Mr. Besant is full when he insists upon the fact that fiction is one of the fine arts, deserving in its turn of all the honours and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved for the successful profession of music, poetry, painting, architecture. It is impossible to insist too much on so important a truth, and the place that Mr. Besant demands for the work of the novelist may be represented, a trifle less abstractly, by saying that he demands not only that it shall be reputed artistic, but that it shall be reputed very artistic indeed. It is excellent that he should have struck this note, for his doing so indicates that there was need of it, that his proposition may be to many people a novelty. One rubs one’s eyes at the thought; but the rest of Mr. Besant’s essay confirms the revelation. I suspect, in truth, that it would be possible to confirm it still further, and that one would not be far wrong in saying that in addition to the people to whom it has never occurred that a novel ought to be artistic, there are a great many others who, if this principle were urged upon them, would be filled with an indefinable mistrust. They would find it difficult to explain their repugnance, but it would operate strongly to put them on their guard. ‘Art,’ in our Protestant communities, where so many things have got so strangely twisted about, is supposed, in certain circles, to have some vaguely injurious effect upon those who make it an important consideration, who let it weigh in the balance. It is assumed to be opposed in some mysterious manner to morality, to amusement, to instruction. When it is embodied in the work of the painter (the sculptor is another affair!) you know what it is; it stands there before you, in the honesty of pink and green and a gilt frame; you can see the worst of it at a glance, and you can be on your guard. But when it is introduced into literature it becomes more insidious-there is danger of its hurting you before you know it. Literature should be either instructive or amusing, and there is in many minds an impression that these artistic preoccupations, the search for form, contribute to neither end, interfere indeed with both. They are too frivolous to be edifying, and too serious to be diverting; and they are, moreover, priggish and paradoxical and superfluous. That, I think, represents the manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an exercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to become articulate. They would argue, of course, that a novel ought to be ‘good,’ but they would interpret this term in a fashion of their own, which, indeed, would vary considerably from one critic to another. One would say that being good means representing virtuous and aspiring characters, placed in prominent positions; another would say that it depends for a ‘happy ending’ on a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks. Another still would say that it means being full of incident and movement, so that we shall wish to jump ahead, to see who was the mysterious stranger, and if the stolen will was ever found, and shall not be distracted from this pleasure by any tiresome analysis or ‘description.’ But they would all agree that the ‘artistic’ idea would spoil some of their fun. One would hold it accountable for all the description, another would see it revealed in the absence of sympathy. Its hostility to a happy ending would be evident, and it might even, in some cases, render any ending at all impossible. The ‘ending’ of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes. It is therefore true that this conception of Mr. Besant’s, of the novel as a superior form, encounters not only a negative but a positive indifference. It matters little that, as a work of art, it should really be as little or as much concerned to supply happy endings, sympathetic characters, and an objective tone, as if it were a work of mechanics; the association of ideas, however incongruous, might easily be too much for it if an eloquent voice were not sometimes raised to call attention to the fact that it is at once as free and as serious a branch of literature as any other. Certainly, this might sometimes be doubted in presence of the enormous number of works of fiction that appeal to the credulity of our generation, for it might easily seem that there could be no great substance in a commodity so quickly and easily produced. It must be admitted that good novels are somewhat compromised by bad ones, and that the field, at large, suffers discredit from overcrowding. I think, however, that this injury is only superficial, and that the superabundance of written fiction proves nothing against the principle itself. It has been vulgarised, like all other kinds of literature, like everything else, to-day, and it has proved more than some kinds accessible to vulgarisation. But there is as much difference as there ever was between a good novel and a bad one: the bad is swept, with all the daubed canvases and spoiled marble, into some unvisited limbo or infinite rubbish-yard, beneath the back-windows of the world, and the good subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection. As I shall take the liberty of making but a single criticism of Mr. Besant, whose tone is so full of the love of his art, I may as well have done with it at once. He seems to me to mistake in attempting to say so definitely beforehand what sort of an affair the good novel will be. To indicate the danger of such an error as that has been the purpose of these few pages; to suggest that certain traditions on the subject, applied a priori, have already had much to answer for, and that the good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it, but it is the only one I can think of. The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable and such as can only suffer from being marked out, or fenced in, by prescription. They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different from others. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated after the fact; then the author’s choice has been made, his standard has been indicated; then we can follow lines and directions and compare tones. Then, in a word, we can enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures, we can estimate quality, we can apply the test of execution. The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant – no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. Here it is especially that he works, step by step, like his brother of the brush, of whom we may always say that he has painted his picture in a manner best known to himself. His manner is his secret, not necessarily a deliberate one. He cannot disclose it, as a general thing, if he would; he would be at a loss to teach it to others. I say this with a due recollection of having insisted on the community of method of the artist who paints a picture and the artist who writes a novel. The painter is able to teach the rudiments of his practice, and it is possible, from the study of good work (granted the aptitude), both to learn how to paint and to learn how to write. Yet it remains true, without injury to the rapprochement, that the literary artist would be obliged to say to his pupil much more than the other, ‘Ah, well, you must do it as you can !’ It is a question of degree, a matter of delicacy. If there are exact sciences there are also exact arts, and the grammar of painting is so much more definite that it makes the difference. I ought to add, however, that if Mr. Besant says at the beginning of his essay that the ‘laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion,’ he mitigates what might appear to be an over-statement by applying his remark to ‘general’ laws, and by expressing most of these rules in a manner with which it would certainly be unaccommodating to disagree. That the novelist must write from his experience, that his ‘characters must be real and such as might be met with in actual life;’ that ‘a young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life,’ and ‘a writer whose friends and personal experiences belong to the lower middle-class should carefully avoid introducing his characters into Society;’ that one should enter one’s notes in a common-place book; that one’s figures should be clear in outline; that making them clear by some trick of speech or of carriage is a bad method, and ‘describing them at length’ is a worse one; that English Fiction should have a ‘conscious moral purpose;’ that ‘it is almost impossible to estimate too highly the value of careful workmanship-that is, of style;’ that ‘the most important point of all is the story,’ that ‘the story is everything’-these are principles with most of which it is surely impossible not to sympathise. That remark about the lower middle-class writer and his knowing his place is perhaps rather chilling; but for the rest, I should find it difficult to dissent from any one of these recommendations. At the same time I should find it difficult positively to assent to them, with the exception, perhaps, of the injunction as to entering one’s notes in a common-place book. They scarcely seem to me to have the quality that Mr. Besant attributes to the rules of the novelist-the ‘precision and exactness’ of ‘the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion.’ They are suggestive, they are even inspiring, but they are not exact, though they are doubtless as much so as the case admits of; which is a proof of that liberty of interpretation for which I just contended. For the value of these different injunctions-so beautiful and so vague-is wholly in the meaning one attaches to them. The characters, the situation, which strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most, but the measure of reality is very difficult to fix. The reality of Don Quixote or of Mr. Micawber is a very delicate shade; it is a reality so coloured by the author’s vision that, vivid as it may be, one would hesitate to propose it as a model; one would expose one’s self to some very embarrassing questions on the part of a pupil. It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms; the most one can affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not; as for telling you in advance how your nosegay should be composed, that is another affair. It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience; to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration might savour of mockery. What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius-it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience, and experience only,’ I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’ I am far from intending by this to minimise the importance of exactness-of truth of detail. One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel-the merit on which all its other merits (including that conscious moral purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his delight. It is here, in very truth, that he competes with life; it is here that he competes with his brother the painter, in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle. It is in regard to this that Mr. Besant is well inspired when he bids him take notes. He cannot possibly take too many, he cannot possibly take enough. All life solicits him, and to ‘render’ the simplest surface, to produce the most momentary illusion, is a very complicated business. His case would be easier, and the rule would be more exact, if Mr. Besant had been able to tell him what notes to take. But this I fear he can never learn in any hand-book; it is the business of his life. He has to take a great many in order to select a few, he has to work them up as he can, and even the guides and philosophers who might have most to say to him must leave him alone when it comes to the application of precepts, as we leave the painter in communion with his palette. That his characters ‘must be clear in outline,’ as Mr. Besant says-he feels that down to his boots; but how he shall make them so is a secret between his good angel and himself. It would be absurdly simple if he could be taught that a great deal of ‘description’ would make them so, or that, on the contrary, the absence of description and the cultivation of dialogue, or the absence of dialogue and the multiplication of ‘incident,’ would rescue him from his difficulties. Nothing, for instance, is more possible than that he be of a turn of mind for which this odd, literal opposition of description and dialogue, incident and description, has little meaning and light. People often talk of these things as if they had a kind of internecine distinctness, instead of melting into each other at every breath and being intimately associated parts of one general effort of expression. I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worth discussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative, a passage of dialogue that is not in its intention descriptive, a touch of truth of any sort that does not partake of the nature of incident, and an incident that derives its interest from any other source than the general and only source of the success of a work of art-that of being illustrative. A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts. The critic who over the close texture of a finished work will pretend to trace a geography of items will mark some frontiers as artificial, I fear, as any that have been known to history. There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character. If you say you don’t see it (character in that–allons donc!) this is exactly what the artist who has reasons of his own for thinking he does see it undertakes to show you. When a young man makes up his mind that he has not faith enough, after all, to enter the Church, as he intended, that is an incident, though you may not hurry to the end of the chapter to see whether perhaps he doesn’t change once more. I do not say that these are extraordinary or startling incidents. I do not pretend to estimate the degree of interest proceeding from them, for this will depend upon the skill of the painter. It sounds almost puerile to say that some incidents are intrinsically much more important than others, and I need not take this precaution after having professed my sympathy for the major ones in remarking that the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting.

The novel and the romance, the novel of incident and that of character-these separations appear to me to have been made by critics and readers for their own convenience, and to help them out of some of their difficulties, but to have little reality or interest for the producer, from whose point of view it is, of course, that we are attempting to consider the art of fiction. The case is the same with another shadowy category, which Mr. Besant apparently is disposed to set up-that of the ‘modern English novel;’ unless, indeed, it be that in this matter he has fallen into an accidental confusion of standpoints. It is not quite clear whether he intends the remarks in which he alludes to it to be didactic or historical. It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one’s language and of one’s time, and calling it modern English will not, alas ! make the difficult task any easier. No more, unfortunately, will calling this or that work of one’s fellow artist a romance-unless it be, of course, simply for the pleasantness of the thing, as, for instance, when Hawthorne gave this heading to his story of Blithedale. The French, who have brought the theory of fiction to remarkable completeness, have but one word for the novel, and have not attempted smaller things in it, that I can see, for that. I can think of no obligation to which the ‘romancer’ would not be held equally with the novelist; the standard of execution is equally high for each. Of course it is of execution that we are talking-that being the only point of a novel that is open to contention. This is perhaps too often lost sight of, only to produce interminable confusions and cross-purposes. We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple-to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things. Gustave Flaubert has written a story about the devotion of a servant-girl to a parrot, and the production, highly finished as it is, cannot on the whole be called a success. We are perfectly free to find it flat, but I think it might have been interesting; and I, for my part, am extremely glad he should have written it; it is a contribution to our knowledge of what can be done or what cannot. Ivan Turgénieff has written a tale about a deaf and dumb serf and a lap-dog, and the thing is touching, loving, a little masterpiece. He struck the note of life where Gustave Flaubert missed it-he flew in the face of a presumption and achieved a victory. Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test. I mention this to guard myself from the accusation of intimating that the idea, the subject, of a novel or a picture, does not matter. It matters, to my sense, in the highest degree, and if I might put up a prayer it would be that artists should select none but the richest. Some, as I have already hastened to admit, are much more substantial than others , and it would be a happily arranged world in which persons intending to treat them should be exempt from confusions and mistakes. This fortunate condition will arrive only, I fear, on the same day that critics become purged from error. Meanwhile, I repeat, we do not judge the artist with fairness unless we say to him, ‘Oh, I grant you your starting point, because if I did not I should seem to prescribe to you, and heaven forbid I should take that responsibility. If I pretend to tell you what you must not take, you will call upon me to tell you then what you must take; in which case I shall be nicely caught! Moreover, it isn’t till I have accepted your data that I can begin to measure you. I have the standard; I judge you by what you propose, and you must look out for me there. Of course I may not care for your idea at all; I may think it silly, or stale, or unclean; in which case I wash my hands of you altogether. I may content myself with believing that you will not have succeeded in being interesting, but I shall of course not attempt to demonstrate it, and you will be as indifferent to me as I am to you. I needn’t remind you that there are all sorts of tastes: who can know it better? Some people, for excellent reasons, don’t like to read about carpenters; others, for reasons even better, don’t like to read about courtesans. Many object to Americans. Others (I believe they are mainly editors and publishers) won’t look at Italians. Some readers don’t like quiet subjects; others don’t like bustling ones. Some enjoy a complete illusion; others revel in a complete deception. They choose their novels accordingly, and if they don’t care about your idea they won’t, a fortiori, care about your treatment.’

So that it comes back very quickly, as I have said, to the liking; in spite of M. Zola, who reasons less powerfully than he represents, and who will not reconcile himself to this absoluteness of taste, thinking that there are certain things that people ought to like, and that they can be made to like. I am quite at a loss to imagine anything (at any rate in this matter of fiction) that people ought to like or to dislike. Selection will be sure to take care of itself, for it has a constant motive behind it. That motive is simply experience. As people feel life, so they will feel the art that is most closely related to it. This closeness of relation is what we should never forget in talking of the effort of the novel. Many people speak of it as a factitious, artificial form, a product of ingenuity, the business of which is to alter and arrange the things that surround us, to translate them into conventional, traditional moulds. This, however, is a view of the matter which carries us but a very short way, condemns the art to an eternal repetition of a few familiar clichés, cuts short its development, and leads us straight up to a dead wall. Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and convention. It is not uncommon to hear an extraordinary assurance of remark in regard to this matter of rearranging, which is often spoken of as if it were the last word of art. Mr. Besant seems to me in danger of falling into this great error with his rather unguarded talk about ‘selection.’ Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive. For many people art means rose-coloured windows, and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off shallow commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art, till you are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and the limits of ignorance. It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase-a kind of revelation-of freedom. One perceives, in that case-by the light of a heavenly ray-that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision. As Mr. Besant so justly intimates, it is all experience. That is a sufficient answer to those who maintain that it must not touch the painful, who stick into its divine unconscious bosom little prohibitory inscriptions on the end of sticks, such as we see in public gardens-‘It is forbidden to walk on the grass; it is forbidden to touch the flowers; it is not allowed to introduce dogs, or to remain after dark; it is requested to keep to the right.’ The young aspirant in the line of fiction, whom we continue to imagine, will do nothing without taste, for in that case his freedom would be of little use to him; but the first advantage of his taste will be to reveal to him the absurdity of the little sticks and tickets. If he have taste, I must add, of course he will have ingenuity, and my disrespectful reference to that quality just now was not meant to imply that it is useless in fiction. But it is only a secondary aid; the first is a vivid sense of reality.

Mr. Besant has some remarks on the question of ‘the story,’ which I shall not attempt to criticise, though they seem to me to contain a singular ambiguity, because I do not think I understand them. I cannot see what is meant by talking as if there were a part of a novel which is the story and part of it which for mystical reasons is not-unless indeed the distinction be made in a sense in which it is difficult to suppose that anyone should attempt to convey anything. ‘The story,’ if it represents anything, represents the subject, the idea, the data of the novel; and there is surely no ‘school’-Mr. Besant speaks of a school- which urges that a novel should be all treatment and no subject. There must assuredly be something to treat; every school is intimately conscious of that. This sense of the story being the idea, the starting-point, of the novel is the only one that I see in which it can be spoken of as something different from its organic whole; and since, in proportion as the work is successful, the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression, in that proportion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may be drawn more or less out of its sheath. The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle or the needle without the thread. Mr. Besant is not the only critic who may be observed to have spoken as if there were certain things in life which constitute stories and certain others which do not. I find the same odd implication in an entertaining article in the Pall Mall Gazette, devoted, as it happens, to Mr. Besant’s lecture. ‘The story is the thing!’ says this graceful writer, as if with a tone of opposition to another idea. I should think it was, as every painter who, as the time for ‘sending in’ his picture looms in the distance, finds himself still in quest of a subject-as every belated artist, not fixed about his donnée, will heartily agree. There are some subjects which speak to us and others which do not, but he would be a clever man who should undertake to give a rule by which the story and the no-story should be known apart. It is impossible (to me at least) to imagine any such rule which shall not be altogether arbitrary. The writer in the Pall Mall opposes the delightful (as I suppose) novel of Margot la Balafrée to certain tales in which ‘Bostonian nymphs’ appear to have ‘rejected English dukes for psychological reasons.’ I am not acquainted with the romance just designated, and can scarcely forgive the Pall Mall critic for not mentioning the name of the author, but the title appears to refer to a lady who may have received a scar in some heroic adventure. I am inconsolable at not being acquainted with this episode, but am utterly at a loss to see why it is a story when the rejection (or acceptance) of a duke is not, and why a reason, psychological or other, is not a subject when a cicatrix is. They are all particles of the multitudinous life with which the novel deals, and surely no dogma which pretends to make it lawful to touch the one and unlawful to touch the other will stand for a moment on its feet. It is the special picture that must stand or fall, according as it seems to possess truth or to lack it. Mr. Besant does not, to my sense, light up the subject by intimating that a story must, under penalty of not being a story, consist of ‘adventures.’ Why of adventures more than of green spectacles? He mentions a category of impossible things, and among them he places ‘fiction without adventure.’ Why without adventure, more than without matrimony, or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or hydropathy, or Jansenism? This seems to me to bring the novel back to the hapless little rôle of being an artificial, ingenious thing-bring it down from its large, free character of an immense and exquisite correspondence with life. And what is adventure, when it comes to that, and by what sign is the listening pupil to recognise it? It is an adventure-an immense one-for me to write this little article; and for a Bostonian nymph to reject an English duke is an adventure only less stirring, I should say, than for an English duke to be rejected by a Bostonian nymph. I see dramas within dramas in that, and innumerable points of view. A psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial; to catch the tint of its complexion-I feel as if that idea might inspire one to Titianesque efforts. There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason, and yet, I protest, the novel seems to me the most magnificent form of art. I have just been reading, at the same time, the delightful story of Treasure Island, by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, and the last tale from M. Edmond de Goncourt, which is entitled Chérie. One of these works treats of murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences and buried doubloons. The other treats of a little French girl who lived in a fine house in Paris and died of wounded sensibility because no one would marry her. I call Treasure Island delightful, because it appears to me to have succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts; and I venture to bestow no epithet upon Chérie which strikes me as having failed in what it attempts-that is, in tracing the development of the moral consciousness of a child. But one of these productions strikes me as exactly as much of a novel as the other, and as having a ‘story’ quite as much. The moral consciousness of a child is as much a part of life as the islands of the Spanish Main, and the one sort of geography seems to me to have those ‘surprises’ of which Mr. Besant speaks quite as much as the other. For myself (since it comes back in the last resort, as I say, to the preference of the individual), the picture of the child’s experience has the advantage that I can at successive steps (an immense luxury, near to the ‘sensual pleasure’ of which Mr. Besant’s critic in the Pall Mall speaks) say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before me. I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for a buried treasure, and it is a simple accident that with M. de Goncourt I should have for the most part to say No. With George Eliot, when she painted that country, I always said Yes.

The most interesting part of Mr. Besant’s lecture is unfortunately the briefest passage-his very cursory allusion to the ‘conscious moral purpose’ of the novel. Here again it is not very clear whether he is recording a fact or laying down a principle; it is a great pity that in the latter case he should not have developed his idea. This branch of the subject is of immense importance, and Mr. Besant’s few words point to considerations of the widest reach, not to be lightly disposed of. He will have treated the art of fiction but superficially who is not prepared to go every inch of the way that these considerations will carry him. It is for this reason that at the beginning of these remarks I was careful to notify the reader that my reflections on so large a theme have no pretension to be exhaustive. Like Mr. Besant, I have left the question of the morality of the novel till the last, and at the last I find I have used up my space. It is a question surrounded with difficulties, as witness the very first that meets us, in the form of a definite question, on the threshold. Vagueness, in such a discussion, is fatal, and what is the meaning of your morality and your conscious moral purpose? Will you not define your terms and explain how (a novel being a picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue; will you not tell us how you would set about it? We are discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair, and will you not let us see how it is that you find it so easy to mix them up? These things are so clear to Mr. Besant that he has deduced from them a law which he sees embodied in English Fiction and which is ‘a truly admirable thing and a great cause for congratulation.’ It is a great cause for congratulation, indeed, when such thorny problems become as smooth as silk. I may add that, in so far as Mr. Besant perceives that in point of fact English Fiction has addressed itself preponderantly to these delicate questions, he will appear to many people to have made a vain discovery. They will have been positively struck, on the contrary, with the moral timidity of the usual English novelist; with his (or with her) aversion to face the difficulties with which, on every side, the treatment of reality bristles. He is apt to be extremely shy (whereas the picture that Mr. Besant draws is a picture of boldness), and the sign of his work, for the most part, is a cautious silence on certain subjects. In the English novel (by which I mean the American as well), more than in any other, there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature. There is the great difference, in short, between what they talk of in conversation and what they talk of in print. The essence of moral energy is to survey the whole field, and I should directly reverse Mr. Besant’s remark, and say not that the English novel has a purpose, but that it has a diffidence. To what degree a purpose in a work of art is a source of corruption I shall not attempt to inquire; the one that seems to me least dangerous is the purpose of making a perfect work. As for our novel, I may say, lastly, on this score, that, as we find it in England to-day, it strikes me as addressed in a large degree to ‘young people,’ and that this in itself constitutes a presumption that it will be rather shy. There are certain things which it is generally agreed not to discuss, not even to mention, before young people. That is very well, but the absence of discussion is not a symptom of the moral passion. The purpose of the English novel-‘a truly admirable thing, and a great cause for congratulation’-strikes me, therefore, as rather negative.

There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is, in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that mind is rich and noble will the novel, the picture, the statue, partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind; that seems to me an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, will cover all needful moral ground; if the youthful aspirant take it to heart it will illuminate for him many of the mysteries of ‘purpose.’ There are many other useful things that might be said to him, but I have come to the end of my article, and can only touch them as I pass. The critic in the Pall Mall Gazette, whom I have already quoted, draws attention to the danger, in speaking of the art of fiction, of generalizing. The danger that he has in mind is rather, I imagine, that of particularizing, for there are some comprehensive remarks which, in addition to those embodied in Mr. Besant’s suggestive lecture, might, without fear of misleading him, be addressed to the ingenuous student. I should remind him first of the magnificence of the form that is open to him, which offers to sight so few restrictions and such innumerable opportunities. The other arts, in comparison, appear confined and hampered; the various conditions under which they are exercised are so rigid and definite. But the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be interesting. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. ‘Enjoy it as it deserves,’ I should say to him; ‘take possession of it, explore it to its utmost extent, reveal it, rejoice in it. All life belongs to you, and don’t listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air and turning away her head from the truth of things. There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert, have worked in this field with equal glory. Don’t think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the colour of life itself. In France to-day we see a prodigious effort (that of Emile Zola, to whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of the novel can allude without respect), we see an extraordinary effort vitiated by a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis. M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in the dark; if he had as much light as energy his results would be of the highest value. As for the aberrations of a shallow optimism, the ground (of English fiction especially) is strewn with their brittle particles as with broken glass. If you must indulge in conclusions let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember that your first duty is to be as complete as possible-to make as perfect a work. Be generous and delicate, and then, in the vulgar phrase, go in!’


More on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: 19C Literature, Henry James Tagged With: 19C Literature, English literature, Henry James, The Art of Fiction, The novel, Theory

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.

The Author 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.

The Author   Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Author   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


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


More on language
More on literary studies
More on writing skills
More on creative writing
More on grammar


Filed Under: Literary Studies, Theory Tagged With: Literary studies, The Author, The novel, Theory

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

July 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

socio-political manifesto of the free software movement

Forget the enigmatic title of The Cathedral and the Bazaar for a moment. This is essentially four long, polemical essays on the open source movement, written by one of its prime movers in the period between 1992 and summer 1999. ‘Open Source’ is a term used to describe the idealistic notion of freely sharing technological development – particularly the software code written by computer programmers. The first and earliest essay sets out the principles of the open source movement. The second inspects the attitudes and moral codes of its members (the hackers) who submit their work to peer review and what Eric Raymond claims is a ‘gift culture’. The third looks at the economic conundrum of how the open source movement sustains itself without a regular income. The last essay is an account of activism relating to the Microsoft anti-trust case.

The Cathedral and the BazaarBasically, it’s an impassioned argument in favour of a new strategy in software development which has arisen from the decision by Linus Torvalds to release the source code of his operating system Linux. He released it not only for free use, but also invited volunteers to help him develop it further. Raymond argues that this represents – dare one say it? – a paradigm shift – a democratic sharing of ideas and repeated testing rather than the development of a product in commercial secrecy.

This is where the title comes in. The ‘cathedral’ is a metaphor for work ‘carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time’. The bazaar represents an open free-for-all approach ‘differing agendas and approaches…out of which a coherent and stable system [can] seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles’.

He inspects the arguments which have been made in criticism of the open source movement, and whilst I wouldn’t say that he demolishes them exactly, he does come up with some interesting points about a system which he is presenting as a revolutionary alternative to the common commercial model. ‘It is often cheaper and more efficient to recruit self-selected volunteers from the Internet than it is to manage buildings full of people who would rather be doing something else’. If the principles of the open source movement really do work in the long term, this will stand a lot of MBA wisdom on its head.

However, his arguments for the advantages of releasing open source on Netscape (in autumn 1998) seem to evade the issue that NS was under intense pressure from Microsoft. He’s making an argument from technological altruism, when deep down the motive might have been economic. But he does explain how a company such as Red Hat can sell open source code (Linux) for a profit, when it’s free for anyone who wants it. They sell – ‘a brand/service/support relationship with people who are freely willing to pay for that’ – and other companies are free to do the same thing if they wish.

As the book reaches its breathy conclusion, the fourth essay becomes a rather personal and excited account of how the open source movement was established in 1998/9 – largely to support Netscape in its fight against Microsoft. No doubt there will be updates to this statement issued at the appropriate web site [www.opensource.org] following each stage of the fight in court.

Some of the anthropological parallels and excursions into political economy seem slightly fanciful, and at times his polemic becomes a sociological study of hackers’ motives – a trap which in literary studies is known as the ‘intentional fallacy’. That is, we shouldn’t judge outcomes on the strength of what we perceive to be the author’s intent. It’s also very idealistic – though the latest edition of WIRED carries an article about open source warriors selling their services on the open market, and Raymond argues that there is no necessary contradiction in this.

It’s the first book on high-tech developments I’ve come across which provided the slightly bizarre experience of a text printed with double line spacing and one-sentence paragraphs. This I imagine reflects the influence of the email originals written for reading on screen. Another interesting feature is that the majority of the bibliographical references are to articles on the Net, not to printed books – though I still think he should have tried to produce an index and bibliography.

He claims that even this book is in a state of evolution via updates following peer review – and that’s exactly as it should be for such a subject. It’s written in a concise, deeply compacted style, with few concessions to an average reader’s technical knowledge, and he’s occasionally cryptic to the point of obscurity: ‘Before taxonomising open-source business models, we should deal with exclusion payoffs in general’.

This is a crusading text, and anyone concerned with the sharp end of software development and the battles of operating systems will be fascinated by his arguments. This revised and expanded paperback edition includes new material on recent technological developments which has made it one of the essential texts on Open Sources

© Roy Johnson 2000

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 1999, pp.268, ISBN: 0596001088


Filed Under: Open Sources Tagged With: Linux, Open Sources, Technology, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Theory

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • Next Page »

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016
  • About Us
  • Advertising
  • Clients
  • Contact
  • FAQ
  • Links
  • Services
  • Reviews
  • Sitemap
  • T & C’s
  • Testimonials
  • Privacy

Copyright © 2025 · Mantex

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in