Amateur Writers Research Articles

Amateur Work: Reader Participation and Dialogism in Late-nineteenth-century Domestic Design Advice

ABSTRACTThis article offers a rereading of Victorian domestic design advice that emphasizes its dialogic qualities rather than presuming its didactic or discursive status. Previous work on late nineteenth-century design advice literature has rightly identified its distance from everyday practice, but various publications demonstrate that domestic design was mediated by readers and often developed through an ongoing conversation with them. This article identifies the dialogic apparatus of one late nineteenth-century how-to magazine, Amateur Work (1881–96), edited by Francis Chilton-Young. Adopting Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism (how texts emerge from different authors and “extraliterary” contexts), this article shows how Amateur Work's editor and writers were in constant dialog with their readers, principally through the reader-response column in each issue entitled “Amateurs in Council.” Case studies on bookcase and fernery construction in this section serve as examples of how content was generated out of reader-to-reader interaction, how tips were shared, and how readers adapted advice to their particular circumstances. Such evidence challenges the presumption that readers of domestic design advice were passive, uncritically following prescriptions by authors or reading such literature for entertainment alone.

Alex Goody Technology, Literature and CultureTechnology, Literature and Culture. Alex Goody. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Pp. viii+193.

<i>Alex Goody</i> Technology, Literature and Culture<i>Technology, Literature and Culture</i>. Alex Goody. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Pp. viii+193.

“Watch Out For The Sharks”: Gender, Technology, and Commerce in the American Song-Poem Industry

AbstractSince the early 1900s, song-poem entrepreneurs, often referred to as “song sharks,” have fueled a diffuse and largely hidden American industry that produces music to accompany the poems and lyrics of amateur writers. These entrepreneurs have long been demonized in the popular media for preying on the naiveté of their clientele. Yet despite charges of exploitation, this musical equivalent of the vanity press has survived for over a century. Although the vast majority of song-poets and their song-poems have remained in obscurity, in the 1990s, song-poems developed a cult following among record collectors; as “anonymous collaborations,” these recordings highlighted tensions between poignant personal expression and impersonal commercial rendering that appealed to listeners with a penchant for the obscure. This article draws on advertisements, sheet music, media coverage, and personal interviews to piece together a history of the song-poem industry, with particular focus on the gendered dimensions of the practice, the role of technology in the production process, and the multiplicity of meanings embedded in song-poems for both song-poets and collectors.

Writing on the Brocken, on the Brocken: The Poetry of the Inn’s Albums

The Brocken visitors’ books were public albums in which walkers recorded their poetic responses to climbing the Brocken Mountain in Northern Germany. The original albums were kept in the Brocken inn and exist in published form, dating from the 1750s to the 1850s. Literary critics have never taken the Brocken visitors’ poetry seriously because of the predominantly comic rhyming verse and parodies of the work of more ‘serious’ or canonical poets, and because it was written by members of the public who wrote poetry recreationally. The poems reveal interesting relations between literature, folklore, and location, between professional and amateur writers, and it highlights the trends in the cultural meanings of the Brocken. The Brocken inn became a dynamic site of reading and writing that gave literary agency to women and amateur writers, and encouraged the performance of the memorialization of landscape and the self.

Lawrence of Arabia and the Shaws (T. E. Lawrence, Correspondence with Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Shaw, Volume 4, 1929–35, edited by Jeremy and Nicole Wilson)

Lawrence of Arabia and the Shaws (T. E. Lawrence, <i>Correspondence with Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Shaw</i>, Volume 4, 1929–35, edited by Jeremy and Nicole Wilson)

Useful Websites

A place where humor, fun and science meet is what David Ng had in mind when creating the website The Science Creative Quarterly (SCQ). As Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory (AMBL), David Ng oversees the educational programs within part of the University of British Columbia known as the Michael Smith Laboratories. Programs vary widely in both scope and target audience, from hands-on molecular biology methodology workshops to ‘genetics field trips’ for grade school students. Besides these faculty duties, Ng combined his interests in science education and writing to create one of the premiere sources of science humor on the web through the SCQ.Ng says that establishing the SCQ website ‘came out of a desire to do something Web 2.0-ish’ for science resources. Originally, the main focus of the website included textbook-style articles aimed at undergraduates and high school students. The site evolved over time as a place to present less traditional and more creative forms of science writing. The change makes sense considering that Ng previously published his own writing in literary outlets such as McSweeney’s, a small publishing house that creates a venue for new ideas and under-represented writers. Now, SCQ is probably best known for its reader-submitted humor pieces, which present droll and witty views of science research. Ng says that he wanted purposely to stay away from ‘typical’ corny and geeky humor: ‘I wanted to publish something more along the lines of “Shouts and Murmurs” in the New Yorker.’ Articles are primarily submitted by amateur writers, but Ng says that some professional writers – even a few former authors from noted publications such as the New Yorker, The New York Times and The Believer – have contributed to the website.The website is designed in the same minimalist, text-heavy style as the popular online literary journal McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, indicative of Ng’s informal social ties with, and admiration of, the McSweeney’s publishing house. ‘Some love [the design], some hate it and find it hard to navigate. We’ve thought about changing it, but not for now,’ Ng says. Either way, the SCQ site traffic indicates how much attention it has been receiving; the SCQ alone is responsible for 3% of all of the web traffic visiting the University of British Columbia’s online servers, with an average of 40,000 page views per day.‘It has become a bit of a “cultish” type of publication,’ Ng admits. Page content is often updated frequently, encouraging readers to come back and revisit the site. Additionally, Ng and the other SCQ contributors have been branching out with new projects such as Filter, a web blog aggregating links and multimedia that have been found by SCQ followers. Another sub-website, ‘The order of the science scouts’, is where SCQ devotees can network and bond in Facebook groups and through Twitter accounts, and, as the name implies, receive ‘scout badges’ for their scientific accomplishments (e.g. the ‘works with very small and potentially dangerous organisms’ badge).Sounding a little bit more than cultish? Perhaps. Silly? Sure. Funny? See for yourself: The Science Creative Quarterly: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/Related links:Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory (AMBL):http://www.bioteach.ubc.ca/UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories:http://www.michaelsmith.ubc.ca/

They Slept upon Their Rifles (review)

446Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril audiors' point diat Natchitoches remained a predominandy French and African creóle community where the few outsiders allowed inside became culturally "Gallic" in a slave society that resembled the Eastern Seaboard, if not the Caribbean, more than the backcountry at the turn of the nineteenth century. OurLady ofthe Lake UniversityFrancis X. Galan They Slept upon Their Rifles. By Marshall E. Kuykendall. (Austin: Nortex Press, 2005. Pp. 416. Illustrations, notes, index. ISBN 9781571689931, $50.00 clotii.) Marshall Kuykendall, a self-described amateur writer and historian, offers a well-documented look at the trek of his ancestors across the North American continent that began in 1645. In addition to his own research, the author has compiled an impressive amount of data from genealogists and family historians around die nation. He begins with a discussion of the family surname, which researchers have concluded was manufactured by an American ancestor around 1 700 and has no provable Old World ties. He then provides a broad overview of the various paths taken by different ancestors. Next, he explores his own paternal lineage. His ancestors left die original Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and traveled southwest ; following long-established American Indian trails along the Appalachian Mountains into eastern Pennsylvania, eastern West Virginia, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee. From there, they followed the trails through the Cumberland Gap and Tennessee, into Kentucky. Robert H. Kuykendall, the author's great-great-great-great grandfather, left Kentucky to join Stephen F. Austin's first group of three hundred Anglos to settle in the Mexican state of Texas y Coahuila. The next (and most detailed) section is a collection of biographies, beginning with diat of Robert Kuykendall and concluding with the author's autobiography. The narratives are drawn from official records, personal letters, and family anecdotes passed down through the generations, and records and stories concerning the family's involvement in the colonization, revolution, and statehood of Texas predominate. One of the most intriguing anecdotes alleges a conspiracy between then-Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson and San Marcos city officials in the late 1930s to condemn privately held property in Hays County for use as a massive military base. The audior's involvement in the 1990s property rights movement known as "Take Back Texas" is also of interest. There are an additional ten biographies of the author's non-linear ancestors, several of whom were also Old Three Hundred members. The entire book is peppered with images of drawings, maps, photos, and letters, along with transcriptions of official land tides, military service records, letters, and family vital statistics. The final section includes family deadi records in Texas for die twentieth century and a record of all family members from Texas who served in the Civil War. The audior's stated goal was to gather a vast array of family records into an 20ogBook Reviews447 accessible format and place diem in the public domain for easy access by future generations whom he believes should not be forced to search for those records "under the bed of some old lady." The author's desire to impart unbiased and uncensored family history is evidenced in his lamentation of the deliberate destruction of presumably "embarrassing" family records by a deceased aunt and the machinations of anodier relative who purposefully changed the names ofvarious family members recorded in an old diary, presumably to protect their reputations . In addition, Kuykendall does not shy away from sharing his ancestor's personal foibles and peccadilloes. On die contrary, he embraces dieir character flaws and failings as essential to understanding his family's history. His enthusiasm for genealogical and historical research is evident throughout, most notably in the almost ubiquitous parenthetical asides expressing personal reactions or commentary. They Slept upon Their Rifles is a compelling genealogical tale of the Kuykendall family, which historian William Goetzmann compares to Louis Lamour's fictional Sackett family. Goetzmann's endorsement, along with that of Ron Tyler, Al Lowman, and Mike Cox, confirm this as a worthwhile read for Texas history enthusiasts. Academic historians will also find great value in the footnotes which point to substantial amounts of primary source material, much of which is to be found in the Center...

Bambini in scena. L'editoria teatrale per l'infanzia tra Otto e Novecento

- The essay explains the first results of a research on the spreading of the acting between children and teenagers in Italy in the period ranging between the XIXth century and the early years of the XXth. Staging various kind of theatrical works - like monologues, dialogues, comedies, both in schools, boarding schools, orphanages, and in domestic theatres of middle-class families, was a very common practice. This phenomenon gave birth to a real publication type where some publishers in particular of Milan, Florence and Turin became skilled in, together with amateur writers, who were often teachers and educationists. A large number of paperback or valuable collections were printed with the purpose of becoming an outline for the performance, by circulating within a heterogeneous public. The great children's theatrical publication season coincides with the building of a Unitarian State: it is therefore not by chance that the themes and subjects echo the objectives of national, patriotic events and pedagogy throughout time.

"Strokes of havoc": Tree-Felling and the Poetic Tradition of Ecocriticism in Manley Hopkins and Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Strokes of havoc":Tree-Felling and the Poetic Tradition of Ecocriticism in Manley Hopkins and Gerard Manley Hopkins Mariaconcetta Costantini (bio) Manley Hopkins' formative influence on his son Gerard has long been recognized by critics. A successful businessman and amateur writer, whose eclectic interests ranged from science to literature, Manley "possessed certain qualities which it is possible also to see in Gerard, the most obvious being voracity of mind."1 Hopkins biographers have suggested that the young poet derived from his father a strong intellectual curiosity, which accounts for the variety of his pursuits. It is most likely that his inquiring attitude was fostered by the learned environment in which he grew up. But the full extent of Manley's influence is yet to be explored. One aspect of neglect is the relevance of the model of poetic creativity provided by the father, who was endowed with a talent for poetry. During his long life, Manley acquired public reputation as an intellectual figure with many interests. Known to the Victorian readership for his works on maritime insurance and other non-literary topics, he also wrote poetry and published three collections of verse. As a child, Gerard must have read and listened to his poems (some were musical pieces and nursery ballads) and certainly knew the poem written to celebrate his birth: "To my child, Gerard Manley" (White, pp. 10-11). His interest in his father's verse did not abate with adulthood. On January 23, 1879, when he was a curate at St. Aloysius' Church, Gerard wrote to his friend Robert Bridges and sent him a new poem by Manley: "I enclose some lines by my father, called forth by the proposal to fell the trees in Well Walk (where Keats and other interesting people lived) and printed in some local paper. See what you think of them. And return them, please."2 The closing sentence, in which he asks to receive the poem back, is a testimony to the appeal that Manley's poetry still held for him. Although he would prove to be a more gifted poet, Gerard drew constant inspiration from his father's verse, which contributed to shaping his artistic imagination. But how pervasive was this influence? And how far did he depart [End Page 487] from the model offered by Manley? Critics generally agree on the presence of the father's "fanciful vein" in his early poems,3 but some maintain that "it is difficult to be precise about the nature of the influence" since Gerard "did not emulate him directly."4 More scrupulous is the comparative analysis conducted by Joseph Feeney.5 After giving an outline of their personal relationship, Feeney shows that both Manley and Gerard had a lively sense of humor, were fond of puns, used similar images, and enjoyed combining ideas and words in eccentric ways. His arguments, which are copiously supported by quotations from the father's and the son's works, invite a critical reflection. If it is true that the Hopkinses shared some tastes and linguistic habits, why were they so unequal in their poetic skill and vision? Feeney himself suggests that Manley's poetry lacks the visual appeal, the shaping force, and the musical intensity of his son's. This gap in style and thought, which is unanimously acknowledged by critics,6 is not only ascribable to the poetic genius of Gerard. It is also the result of important differences in their aesthetic choices, their approaches to reality, and their sense of continuity with the poetic past. By pondering on the formative role played by Manley, which merits recognition, we can discover new hermeneutic paths to explore some aspects of the poetic experimentation carried out by Gerard. A new impulse to compare their poetry has come from a recent essay published by Jude Nixon, which uncovers the text of the Manley poem on the Well Walk trees that for years had remained speculative. The poem, entitled "The Old Trees," first appeared anonymously in the weekly Hampstead & Highgate Express (December 28, 1878) as a response to a public controversy over the decision of the Trustees of the Wells Charity "to cut down the trees on one side of...

Fifty Years in Kwahu-Tafo: Memories and Reflections of an Anthropologist

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 10 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 65 FIFTY YEARS IN KWAHU-TAFO Memories and Reflections of an Anthropologist SJAAK VAN DER GEEST Introduction Near my village in The Netherlands is a house with a Latin inscription, a famous line from the African philosopher St. Augustine: Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis (Time changes and we change with it). I sometimes pass by on my bicycle and the words keep turning in my head while my feet continue turning the pedals: What were the most prominent changes of my time and how was I drawn into them? One event that deeply affected my life was my visit to the rural town of Kwahu-Tafo in Ghana forty years ago and the many visits that followed, up to today. In contrast with most of my colleagues, I have largely stuck to one place for fieldwork throughout my anthropological career. How did life in Kwahu-Tafo change over all those years? And how did I change with it as an anthropologist, or for that matter, as a person? Much has been written about subjectivity as a requisite for (not an obstacle to) anthropological fieldwork. The importance of related personal experience for raising questions, observing people and understanding words and actions is now a standard topic in methodological instructions for anthropologists. Without subjectivity, there is no intersubjectivity and— therefore—no communication. Introspection or reflection, searching oneself to understand the other, is commonly discussed in those instructions and is widely practised in anthropological publications. Much less has been written about how the fieldwork experience affects the personal life of the researcher. Paraphrasing Geertz, Eriksen (2004: 11) writes that all humans are born with the potential to live thousands of different lives, yet we end up having lived only one. One of the central tasks of 66 Ghana Studies • volume 10 • 2007 anthropology consists of giving accounts of some of the other lives we could have led. Writing about people’s lives in Kwahu-Tafo, I have always been aware that their life could have been mine. That awareness created closeness and distance at the same time. What changed in Kwahu-Tafo over the last fifty years immediately raises the question of what changed in me during that period. Déjà Vu I arrived in Kwahu-Tafo around Easter time in 1969, twelve years after Ghana’s independence, and three years after the coup that ended Nkrumah ’s hopeful beginning. The purpose of my stay was to learn Twi. I was given accommodation in the Catholic mission house with an American priest. The first night I hardly slept. There was an enormous noise on the other side of the road, with people shouting for hours. The next morning I learned that a man had died and that the man’s family had decided to expel the widow and her children from the house, because she belonged to another family. “This is a matrilineal society,” the priest commented, “it happens all the time.” Twenty-five years later I met Anthony Obeng Boamah, a man about my own age, who was an amateur writer and an interesting person. We became friends and worked together in doing research. He told me about the books and stories he had written. His first novel, he said, was in Twi, and was based on some personal experiences in his family, 25 years ago around Easter. It told the story of what happened to a mother and her children after her husband had died. I asked if I could read the book. It was not possible because he did not have a copy. He had brought the manuscript to the Bureau of Ghana Languages that occupied itself with the publication of literature in local languages. They had read the book and promised to edit and publish it. It was never published. Staff members at the Bureau changed over the years, some died, and every time Boamah went to look for his manuscript, he met another person with another story and the same van der Geest • Fifty Years in Kwahu-Tafo 67 promises. “Maybe, I should...

Jersey Story: The Encyclopedia and Historical Imagination

Maxine N. Lurie & Marc Mappen, eds., maps by Michael Siegel. Encyclopedia of New Jersey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 912 pp. Thirty color and 555 black & white illustrations and 150 maps. $49.95. An encyclopedia about New Jersey is neither an oxymoron nor a joke. The entry "Jersey jokes" is found on page 425 of this volume. The first sentence reads: "Among the fifty states, New Jersey is notorious as the object of humor." (A corresponding entry, "Image," cites then-governor Christi Todd Whitman's annual address to the legislature in 1995: "Nobody is laughing at New Jersey anymore" [pp. 401–2]). The entry for New Jersey Turnpike—lengthier than the one about jokes—includes a map identifying the exits as well as the twelve service areas (each named to honor a notable, including Clara Barton, Grover Cleveland, Vince Lombardi, Molly Pitcher, and Walt Whitman) (pp. 579–81). Readers will find other requisite entries: organized crime, Philip Roth, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Springsteen (pp. 606–7; 706; 745; 766–7). An entry for the Sopranos was not included, but they make a cameo appearance folded into organized crime. But snide suspicions and condescension aside, the Encyclopedia of New Jersey, conceptually and substantively, is an admirable addition to a proliferating genre. Place-defined historical encyclopedias—whether about regions, states, or cities—became quite the rage in the closing decades of the twentieth century. An encyclopedia devoted to the state of New York nears publication. The New Georgia Encyclopedia holds the distinction of only being available online. By my calculations, the trend for these compendiums took hold—of all places—in Cleveland. (The late David Van Tassel inspired the Cleveland volume, a dividend of his many years in the department of history at Case Western Reserve University). Next was Indianapolis. The Encyclopedia of New York City is celebrated not solely for luminous scholarship and comprehensive coverage. It is also a commercial achievement as the all-time, best-selling title ever released by Yale University Press, befitting its subject's sobriquet as world capital of capitalism. (We learn in the New Jersey editors' preface that New York City's encyclopedia inspired them [p. xi].) Gracious acknowledgment [End Page 455] amounts to a rare historical moment in an internecine inter-state rivalry between New Jersey and New York that stretches back to the seventeenth century and whose foremost by-product was Chief Justice John Marshall's landmark opinion in 1824 on federal jurisdiction over commerce in Gibbons vs. Ogden. The entry on this decision in the New York City volume fails to mention by name where and how New Jersey figured into this dispute. A much-revised and expanded second edition of the New York City volume is in the works, unquestionably hastened by the transformations stemming from the epochal events of 9/11. The Encyclopedia of Chicago appeared one year ago. Features include: a sumptuous physical design (comparable to the New York City volume); superlative, originally drawn maps; eighteen often free-wheeling, interpretive essays; a metropolitan scope encompassing nine counties (including two in northwest Indiana); splendid photographs, some published for the very first time; and an uncommon multi-institutional collaboration amongst the Newberry Library, Chicago Historical Society, and Northwestern University. Six months ago, a powerful online edition appeared that stands tall in its own right, exemplifying the nexus between traditional scholarship and the ever-expanding outer reaches of digital technology. A scaled-down city-defined encyclopedia, useful if not as comprehensive, also has been published for Los Angeles. There are numerous regional iterations as well (at least two for the South, several for the West, about-to-be-published volumes for New England, and another for the Midwest).1 Historical encyclopedias are neither entirely new nor unfamiliar. Many such volumes were assembled in the second half of the nineteenth century. Amateur writers, to whom we should be exceedingly grateful despite methodological lapses and circumscribed horizons, commonly compiled them: indeed, a century ahead, what...

Hemingway's Notion of "Grace"

NOTES HEMINGWAY'S NOTION OF "GRACE" George Monteiro Brown University The opening sentence of Mark Schorer's 1952 review of Ernest Hemingway 's The Old Man and the Sea reads: "The only guts that are mentioned in this story are the veritable entrails of fish, but we are nevertheless reminded on every page that Hemingway once defined this favorite word, in its metaphorical use, as 'grace under pressure'."1 Schorer thereby perpetuated what was already a canard in Hemingway studies, one that persists to this day. Even the author's own denial in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald that "guts" was what he meant by the phrase did not entirely dispel the prevailing notion. Whatever Hemingway meant by "grace under pressure," what he precisely did not mean was "guts." To Fitzgerald he explained, on April 20, 1926, that "it makes no difference your telling G[erald] Murphy about bull fighting statement except will be careful about making such statements. Was not referring to guts but to something else. Grace under pressure. Guts never made any money for anybody except violin string manufacturers. "2 It was not Fitzgerald, however, who first carried the phrase over into print. That credit, it appears, belongs to Dorothy Parker. In 1929, she wrote in The New Yorker: That brings me to the point which I have been trying to reach all this time: Ernest Hemingway's definition of courage—his phrase that, it seems to me, makes Barrie's "Courage is immortality" sound like one of the more treble trillings of Tinker Bell. Mr. Hemingway did not use the term "courage." Ever the euphemist, he referred to the quality as "guts," and he was attributing its possession to an absent friend. "Now just a minute," somebody said, for it was one of those argumentative evenings. "Listen. Look here a minute. Exactly what do you mean by 'guts'?" "I mean," Hemingway said, "grace under pressure." That grace is his. The pressure, I suppose, comes in, gratis, under the heading of the Artist's reward.3 If the "grace" belonged to Hemingway, so, it might appear, did the phrase "grace under pressure." No one, it seems, has questioned the notion that he coined the phrase. Nor is there any reason to question it. What does seem likely, however, is something else, namely that his idea of what constituted "grace" was anticipated by his predecessor in the short story, Anton Chekhov. 112George Monteiro In his letters, some of which were translated into English in 1924, Chekhov talks about "grace." To his younger contemporary and fellow writer Maxim Gorky, he writes: "Your best things are 'On the Steppe,' and 'On the Raft.'" He continues: They are splendid things, masterpieces; they show the artist who has passed through a very good school. I don't think that I am mistaken. The only defect is the lack of restraint, the lack of grace. When a man spends the least possible number of movements over some definite action, that is grace."· Chekhov's notion fits perfectly with Hemingway's aesthetics as well as his ethic. When Hemingway moved from Cuba in 1959, he left behind at Finca Vigía five volumes of Chekhov's stories in English, the Constance Garnett translations published in the 1920s. This small collection included The Schoolmaster, and Other Stories (1921), The Wife, and Other Stories (1921), The Cook's Wedding, and Other Stories (1922), The Duel, and Other Stories (1922), and The Party, and Other Stories (1925).5 Since Hemingway was an avid reader,6 one who moved around a good deal and therefore perforce left some things behind and lost others, even this generous sampling of Chekhov in his Cuban library should not be assumed to constitute the totality of his reading of the Russian's work, though it does serve to suggest an early date for his acquaintance with Chekhov's fiction. Confirmation of this appears in his letter of December 20, 1925, to his friend Archibald MacLeish. From Schruns, where he was vacationing with his wife and young son, he wrote that Chekhov, although "an amateur writer," did write "about 6 good stories."7 This "amateur" had also stipulated a definition for the...

Writing for Publication

TERARY ETHICS are very much like any others. They are based on the ordinary fundamental ideas of fair play, and these have been crystallized in certain generally accepted customs. Like any other moral rules they are sometimes supported by the law, and sometimes go on to operate where the law is silent. Literary ethics also resemble the other kind in that they are sometimes rather vague and are occasionally violated. Many of the violations of the usual rules of publishing, when committed by amateur writers, are due to simple ignorance. Perhaps the most obvious problem of this sort is that of plagiarism. What isand what is not-the writer's own work? This is a problem which always makes trouble for the amateur, since we are all borrowers and since all investigators necessarily borrow earlier workers in the same field. No scientific or scholarly studies are ever completely original. If we all started literally from scratch-that is, the very beginnings of human knowledge-there would be no progress. The advancement of learning is possible only because of the fact that we can and do borrow the work of students who have gone before us. We stand on the shoulders of our predecessors. If we did not, there would be no advance in knowledge. There is, however, a fair way and an unfair way to borrow, and there is both a legal and a moral side to the rules that distinguish between them. Legally, an unpublished manuscript is protected by the ordinary common law, precisely as property of any other form is protected. These rights are lost when the manuscript's contents are offered for sale to the public. As the ultimate object of writing is publication for sale to the public, the commonlaw protection of the writer exists only during the period when he is working on his manuscript or looking for a publisher.

A Biographical Tribute to Earle Beattie on his Retirement as Editor

It was 1935 when the two of us met as "young Turks" in the depression-ridden prairie city of Winnipeg. Earle Beattie had come from Vancouver a few years before and at the age of 14 began writing articles and fiction for the Young Authors Section of the Free Press. Writing and editing came easily to him. He was writing a column by the age of 16 and became an assistant editor for the Section, following graduation from high school. He had become a moving spirit among amateur writers in Manitoba and his first paid job as a reporter for the Free Press was reviewing plays and shows around town. Later, he went to United College (now the University of Winnipeg) and became a college correspondent for the Free Press at 20 cents a column inch. I did the same for the Winnipeg Tribune and there was lively competition.

The Elizabeth Laureate: Self-Presentation and the Literary System

In the 1590s, when Ben Jonson set up for poet, the English literary world offered three career models: the amateur, the professional, and what I will call the laureate. Twenty years earlier, when Spenser was beginning to write, there had been only one, the amateur. Between those dates, the expansion of the literary market, particularly the market for plays, had brought into existence a small but active group of true professionals, men who depended on writing for a livelihood, and, at the same time, Spenser's own, still uncompleted career was providing an English example of that quintessentially humanist construct, the laureate poet. But despite these changes, Jonson's situation in the 1590s was in many ways comparable to what Spenser's had been in the 1570s. Just as Spenser had been obliged in his laureate self-fashioning to rely on notions of the poet and of poetry current among the amateur writers of his generation, so Jonson depended on amateur and professional patterns of a literary career in his. The humanist idea of the poetthe idea which, in their different ways, both Spenser and Jonson sought to realize-could in part inform, but had also to conform itself to the actual body of contemporary literary practice. Thus though the English laureates learned much from the example of such illustrious predecessors as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Ronsard and from the precepts of various ancient and modern defenders of poetry, they were forced to adapt what they had learned to the literary system of their own time and place. In doing so, they gave historical form to what in England had hitherto been merely a disembodied cultural ideal. My purpose in this paper is to examine the exigencies which shaped that accomplishment-to determine why Spenser, Jonson, and the other sixteenth-century English poets of laureate ambition, Chapman, Daniel, and Drayton, presented themselves as they did. Borrowing on occasion from the concepts of modern linguistics, I will try to show how these poets manipulated the Elizabethan literary system to make it say something about them quite unlike what it

The Amateur Writer on Music

The Amateur Writer on Music