Literary Family Research Articles

Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family by Stephen Hebron, Elizabeth C. Denlinger, and: Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet by Elizabeth C. Denlinger, Stephen Hebron

Book Reviews Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth C. Denlinger. Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2010. Pp. 192. $35Shelley ’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet. Curated by Elizabeth C. Denlinger and Stephen Hebron. New York: The New York Public Library, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim in Gallery. February 24-June 24, 2012. The occasion for the volume and exhibition under review is the purchase in 2004 by the Bodleian Libraries of the Abinger Papers, the final portion ofthe Shelley family archive inherited by Sir Percy Florence Shelley, son of Percy and Mary Shelley, and protected through the Victorian period by him and his wife Lady Jane Shelley. The book by Hebron and Denlinger (the copyright page attributes the first eight chapters to Hebron and the ninth to Denlinger) narrates the winding path of these papers and objects from Mary Shelley’s possession and editorial efforts following Percy’s death, through their residence in Lady Shelley’s “Shelley Sanctum” at Boscombe Manor in Dorset. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Lady Shelley decided to split the archive into three bequests: the Shelley papers and relics were divided between the Bodleian and John C. E. Shel­ ley (a cousin of Percy Florence descended from the poet’s younger brother and later Sir John Shelley-Rolls), while the rest, including the Frankenstein manuscripts and William Godwin’s journal, among other important items, was handed down to the two sons of Lady Jane’s adopted daughter Bessie and her husband Leopold Scarlett. The sons ofBessie and Leopold Scarlett became the 5th and 6th Barons Abinger, whose archive was purchased by the Bodleian. At the Bodleian it joins Lady Shelley’s original bequest and the archive of SirJohn Shelley-Rolls, which was received by the Bodleian in 1961. Over a hundred years since it was first parceled out, Lady Shelley’s original Boscombe archive is complete again. Both the volume by Hebron and Denlinger and the exhibition they co­ curated in New York (Hebron curated two previous incarnations of this exhibition in the UK) amount to a celebration ofthe reunited archive as an important turning point in how scholars and biographers now can write, or rewrite, the lives and “afterlives” of the Shelleys and the Godwins, insofar as the Abinger Papers will be catalogued for the first time and available SiR, S3 (Summer 2014) 265 266 BOOK REVIEWS more widely. The effects are already apparent: for example, the Oxford Digital Library edition of William Godwin’s Diary (2010) provides images and searchable transcriptions of what is one of the great records of radical literary and political life in Romantic London, the diary Godwin kept for forty-eight years. In addition, the complete Frankenstein notebooks, one of the other major pieces of the Abmger Collection, have been published by another digital project, The Shelley-Godwin Archive, which is an ongoing collaboration between, among other partners, the NYPL, the Bodleian, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. The mate­ rial and textual riches of the complete archive, on display not only in these digital projects and at the exhibition in New York but also in the 83 highquality photographs in the book under review, invite a reassessment of the lives and legacies of the Shelleys and the Godwins. It is fair to say, however, that Percy Shelley—rather than Mary Shelley, William Godwin, or Mary Wollstonecraft—is at the center of the revisionary call implicit in both the exhibition and the book by Hebron and Denlinger. Indeed, one might even sense a small amount ofproductive tension between the title and subtitle of the book: the title refers to P. B. Shelley, as on the glossy cover the poet’s name sits above a striking photo­ graph of his marble head and torso, as rendered by Edward Onslow Ford and Basil Champneys in their Shelley Memorial that resides at University College, Oxford. Yet the subtitle states that it is the “literary family” whose “image” is being revised. What is more, the title of the exhibition in New York eschews reference to the “literary family” altogether, asking us to fo­ cus more narrowly on the legacy of the poet...

Romanticism and Caricature by Ian Haywood

268 BOOK REVIEWS informed Hebron’s and Denlinger’s exhibition at the NYPL: passing Ed­ ward Clark Potter’s marble lions on the way into the Stephen A. Schwartzman Building, one walks through the echoic Astor Hall to find “awed whispers” in the Sue and Edgar Wachenheinr in Gallery. The room is small and dim—sanctum-like—when contrasted to the white marble expanse of Astor Hall, and relics and manuscripts under glass line the walls and the spine of the room. From fragments of the poet’s skull that belonged to Ed­ ward John Trelawney to the holograph of “A Philosophical View of Re­ form,” from Harriet Shelley’s gold, turquoise, and diamond engagement ring to Percy’s gold and coral baby rattle, the objects and manuscripts on display can, indeed, not only elicit our hushed awe but also incite our fur­ ther reflection on the poet, the literary family, and their legacy. Matthew C. Borushko Stonehill College Ian Haywood. Romanticism and Caricature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2013. Pp. x+221. S95. Ian Haywood’s Romanticism and Caricature is an exciting and comprehensive study ranging in its attention from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and its radical (religious and political) ideas about monarchy and reform to the hunting down of traitors, the French Napoleonic Wars, the spectral presence of Tom Paine’s and Napoleon’s bodies, and the Reform Bill. Building on Haywood’s work on radical print culture, visual culture, and forgery, Romanticism and Caricature is the latest of a number of studies on spectacle and visual culture such as William Galperin’s The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (1993), Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s The Shock of the Real (2001), Sophie Thomas’s Romanticism and Visuality (2010), and Peter Otto’s Multiplying Worlds (2011). Haywood draws on these works as well as Marcus Wood’s Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790—1822 (1994) and Vic Gatrell’s City of Laughter (2006). Haywood’s contribution to this con­ versation lies in his ability to generate a method of analysis which reevalu­ ates the cultural significance of caricature by reappraising its aesthetic quali­ ties and discursive potential in relation to specific political events, elevating prints into an important art form and topic ofRomantic studies. Haywood takes as a central concern, for example, the changes in visual consumption of the scene from Paradise Lost in which Sin tries to prevent Satan and Death from attacking each other. Their confrontation, used as a template for confrontation in European as well internal or party-political powerSi 'R, 53 (Summer 2014) BOOK REVIEWS 269 struggles, is the recurring configuration of the case studies Haywood dis­ cusses in individual chapters. As Haywood emphasizes, caricaturists were often deliberately unclear about their political allegiances, even as those trying to stop them were wary that suppression would boost rather than minimize public attention to the satires. Though direct personal attacks were rare in the Romantic pe­ riod (a notable exception being the work ofJames Gillray), graphic satire thrived alongside portraiture and a viewing public would have easily identified contemporary figures appearing in caricatures. Haywood stresses that, as narrative and the creation ofalternative realities became ever more important, style in caricature tended to matter as much as subject: “some­ where near the heart of caricature’s proliferating layers of intertextual and intervisual meaning is the self-reflexive ‘signature’ of the caricaturist, a vi­ sual imprint of the point at which history passes over into fantasy and phantasia through the transforming agency of the satirical imagination” (5). This kind of imagination chimes, of course, with the Romantic debate about the “transformative powers of the imagination” and its “unstable” aesthetics” (6). Chapter 1 discusses how Gillray’s Sin, Death and the Devil (1792) reorga­ nizes the familiar religious and political imagery coined by Milton. Haywood traces the imagery through a whole range of similar prints and argues that Sin, the evil female that used to embody “corruption, conspir­ acy and monstrous gestation” (21), comes to represent the output of the prolific radical press so that Gillray’s print can be read as “anti-Paineite propaganda” (29). Chapter 2, discussing Gillray’s Midas (1797) and Cruikshank ’s Bank...

Historical Reconstruction of the Literary Family

文学世家历史还原的过程,也是一个逻辑建构的过程。以政治文化制度变革为核 心动力,通过家族史与文学史演变的双重梳理,可以对中国通代文学世家发展演变历 程进行历史还原,即前中后三大时段三重形态的相互衔接与有序推进: 两汉至南北朝 “经学—文学世家”与“门阀—文学世家”双重形态的衔接与演进; 隋唐时期“门 阀—文学世家”与“科宦—文学世家”混合形态的交替与演进; 两宋至明清“科宦— 文学世家”主流形态的承变与演进。在上述主体形态之外,尚有其他类型文学世家的 多元存在。文学世家史学术范式的建构,需要通过特定个体、时代、区域以及通代文 学世家史四个层级的链接而融合为有机整体。 关键词: 文学世家 历史还原 逻辑建构 The process of reconstructing the history of the literary family is also a process of logical construction. By focusing on the transformation of political and cultural institutions and sorting through the historical evolution both of literature and of distinguished families, we can describe the historical evolution of the literary family in Chinese dynastic history, that is, the succession and the orderly progress of its three forms over three periods. The first period from the Han Dynasty to the Northern and Southern Dynasties saw the emergence of “literary families of classical scholars,” and their evolutionary successors, “literary families with hereditary power.” In the second period of Sui and Tang Dynasties, this latter group coexisted and to some extent merged with “literary families of scholar-officials” in a composite form. The third period of Song, Ming and Qing Dynasties witnessed the continuation and transformation of the mainstream form of “literary families of scholar-officials.” In addition to the above groups, there existed a multiplicity of other forms. To construct an academic paradigm of the history of the literary family, we need to integrate four levels of research into an organic unity: research on individual literary families, research on families in specific periods and in specific regions, and research on the literary family across history.

Shelley’s Ghost, Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family

Shelley’s Ghost, Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family

The Maitland and the Sinclair Families:The Chronicles of Scotlandand its Early Modern Readers

The Maitlands and the Sinclairs, two eminent early-modern literary families, are known for their collection of manuscripts and printed books. They had much in common in their treatment of their collections. Their approaches to their books were, however, fundamentally different. While the Sinclairs were concerned about the texts of their books, the Maitlands were more concerned about the physical value of the books. In order to illuminate this point, I compare the ways in which members of these families treated their copies of the same work, namely John Bellenden's Chronicles of Scotland . Their approaches to their copies are remarkably contrastive; Henry Sinclair glossed his copy thoroughly and left many text-related annotations, while the Duke of Lauderdale, who owned the Chronicles in duplicate, left no textual annotations, but made his ownership apparent. By examining this evidence, this essay seeks to consider the variety of ways in which early modern book collectors enjoyed and utilized their books, and how the trend of book collecting changed in course of time.

Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China by Beata Grant (review)

Reviewed by: Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China by Beata Grant Michael Saso (bio) Beata Grant. Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. xi, 242 pp. Epilogue, notes, selected bibliography, index. Hardcover $46.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3202-5. This eminently readable and thoroughly researched work of Beata Grant, a wellknown and acclaimed scholar of literature, Buddhism, and women’s studies in China, presents one of the most valuable, unique insights into the role of female Chan (Zen) masters in seventeenth-century China. One of the most compelling aspects of the work is the faultless series of translations of texts left behind by female Chan masters themselves, or their female disciples, who recorded their literary works. Grant allows the women Linji (Japanese: Rinzai) Chan masters to speak for themselves, in faultless prose, or Chan-style verse, which, indeed, makes Eminent Nuns a treasury of citations to be cherished for their own intrinsic worth. The first and foremost eminent nun, Qiyuan Xinggang (1597–1654), the subject of chapters 3 and 4, laid the groundwork for the disciples and dharma heirs who succeeded her or were inspired to follow in her footsteps. Qiyuan Xinggang’s reasons for becoming a nun—the death of her espoused fiancé, her own personal desire to seek a life of Buddhist practice, and the inspiration of a Linji Chan monk who accepted her as a disciple—were closely related to the social and cultural upheaval of the seventeenth-century transition between the Han Chinese in origin Ming dynasty and the Altaic Manchu in origin Qing rulers. The introduction and chapters 1 and 2 explain the texts and contexts and the sociopolitical factors that influenced the flourishing of Buddhism as part of a sometimes bloody transition between two quite different dynasties. Among more important factors, as seen in Qiyuan Xinggang’s life as well as in the lives of many of her followers, were (1) a high level of classical education among the daughters of traditional literary families; (2) an acceptable recourse for high-ranking, devout women whose husbands were executed or died during the wars preceding and following the first years of the Qing dynasty Manchu rule; and (3) the rebirth of the Linji or huatou (first phrase of a Gongan koan poetic quote) used to inspire sudden Chan insights. The social-spiritual milieu in which the Chan revival occurred, during the early Qing dynasty transition of power, took place mainly in South China (that is, south of the Yangzi River), where Chan masters as well as monastic master-disciple teaching could take place. One of the most telling passages relates Qiyuan Xinggang’s struggle and preliminary success in solving the huatou conundrum proposed in a dialogue between her two male masters, Shiche Tongshen and Jinsu. The passage, quoted on page 46, must be read fully to realize the effect of the nun’s reply to the master’s question, “When you are dead and cremated, where will you be?” (Response: “Red dust rising from the bottom of the Sea.”) [End Page 600] The best known of the seven officially designated dharma heirs of Qiyuan Xinggang is the nun Yikui Chaochen, who wrote the biography quoted in chapter 4 and her own set of Yulu Recorded Sayings, the subject of chapter 5, “Passing on the Lamp.” Her quite moving (to this reviewer) teachings are found on page 100, in which the quiet life in a monastic nunnery and the presence of a devoted and caring master are the basic causes for real success in practice. Due to her governance, the three nunneries under her became centers for laity as well as monastic refuge and succor. Seven of Qiyuan Xinggang’s dharma successors were born and raised in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang cultural areas, which were, during the seventeenth century, strongholds of Confucian as well Buddhist and Daoist classical literary studies. Two of her dharma heirs, whose writings are preserved in the Jiaxing Ming dynasty Buddhist canon (Daxing Dazang Jing, 40 vols., Taipei reprint: Xinwenfeng chubanshe, 1987), were from Hengzhou in Hunan Province: Jizong Xingche, who is the subject of chapter 6, and the late...

The Shelleys on Display: Exhibiting Lives and Letters

The Shelleys on Display: Exhibiting Lives and Letters Paul Stock Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family. An exhibition held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 3 December 2010–27 March 2011; Dove Cottage, Grasmere, 7 July–31 October 2011; New York Public Library, 17 February–24 June 2012. Accompanying book by Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth C. Denlinger (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2010). Pp. 192. $35.00. Accompanying website: http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ Shelley’s Ghost, an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Dove Cottage, and the New York Public Library, is explicitly concerned with the forms and processes of literary and biographical memorialization. It concentrates on the family papers of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, their daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. As Stephen Hebron, the curator, explains in his accompanying volume, the exhibition is not “a biography of these great literary figures, nor a critical appraisal of their work.” Instead, it displays “the manuscripts on which so many biographies and critical appreciations have been based, and explores how these manuscripts were either published or withheld by their owners in an attempt to shape the family’s reputation” (13). The exhibition begins with papers relating to Wollstonecraft’s marriage and death, especially Godwin’s notoriously candid Memoir of her life and work. The outrage that greeted this memoir leads the viewer to another publishing scandal thirteen years later, Percy Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford for writing The Necessity of Atheism. The exhibition’s focus then turns to the complex and enthralling personal lives of the Godwin-Shelley circle: interwoven and sensational tales of elopements, suicides, illegitimate children, fatal accidents, financial hardship, and—lest we forget—exceptional literary productivity. Alongside letters and relics documenting these events are manuscripts and notebooks containing drafts, sketches, and collaborations [End Page 177] by the Shelleys and their associates. The rest of the exhibition details subsequent attempts to honor and control the Shelleys’ posthumous images, first by Mary herself following her husband’s death, and later by her daughter-in-law Lady Jane Shelley, who worked tirelessly to craft a family history and image fit for the Victorians and later posterity. Shelley’s Ghost therefore engages with the central practices of exhibiting: how the politics of choosing, displaying, preserving, and even destroying texts and other materials can service particular interpretations of people and their histories. Evidently, there are important questions here for historical, literary, and biographical studies, specifically how the deployment and presentation of certain kinds of evidence can affect not simply the assessment of literary import or the construction of an individual life story but also the comprehension of “the past” in broader terms. When gazing at relics from Lady Shelley’s “Shelley Sanctum”—locks of hair, jewelry, cutlery—one wonders what exactly is being memorialized by these objects? The lives of famous literary figures, elevated to pseudo-sainthood by the very preservation of their inconsequential trinkets? The sensibilities of Lady Shelley herself, determined to celebrate, crystallize, and disseminate her personal reverence and familial pride? Or do the objects reveal wider late nineteenth-century presumptions about the proper interpretation of the past and its actors: attention to personal material possessions, legitimate genealogy and aristocratic descent, and sanctioned histories authorized and framed by the guardians of the necessary evidence? Shelley’s Ghost invites us to contemplate the overlapping complexities of these issues, not least because it requires a certain self-consciousness about the nature of exhibition-going. It encourages us to see the objects viewed and the practices of viewing them as dually implicated in interpretative processes. When we see the Sanctum relics, we are looking at a Victorian individual’s understanding of a more distant past, but we do so through the additional filter of our own twenty-first-century predilections and perspectives, especially the trappings of a modern celebrity culture that values biographical exposure (34). Throughout Shelley’s Ghost, understanding lives and letters is never a straightforward matter. One of the exhibition’s key themes is that members of the Godwin-Shelley circle consciously conducted and constructed their lives through both writing itself and the collection and presentation of documents. This point is first evident in Godwin...

Marks of Possession: Methods for an Impossible Subject

In her 1892 study of children's literature, the child and his book, louise frances field complains, “the subject of this volume is one which, from its nature, presents many difficulties as regards material. It is the fate of children's books to be destroyed by children themselves” (v). Of course, the difficulties of children's literature are not only material. Jacqueline Rose's insistence on the “impossibility of children's fiction” has had the salutary effect of keeping scholars warily attuned to how adult desires—from sex to money to politics—structure the genre. Despite the claim of possession housed in that apostrophe, most scholars of children's literature acknowledge that these books don't really belong to children at all (Hunt). My intention in this essay is to use one of these impossibilities to circumvent the other. I am interested in children's own relation to their reading; I strive to understand not just the books adults produced for children—that is, what adults thought about childhood and wanted to say to children—but also what children actually did with these texts, how they took possession of them. I hope to demonstrate that the penchant for destroying books that Field deplores can provide insight into the literary history of childhood. For this brief essay, I take as my archive the book-destroying habits of the children of one affluent, highly literary family in post–Civil War New England: the niece and nephews of the poet Emily Dickinson—Edward (“Ned”), born in 1861; Martha (“Mattie”), born in 1866; and Thomas Gilbert (“Gib”), born in 1875.

April and Esme, Tooth Fairies (review)

Reviewed by: April and Esme, Tooth Fairies Hope Morrison Graham, Bob. April and Esme, Tooth Fairies; written and illus. by Bob Graham. Candlewick, 2010. 32p. ISBN 978-0-7636-4683-7 $16.99 R* 5-8 yrs. Seven-year-old April Underhill has just gotten her first commission (by cell phone) as tooth fairy, and she's taking her little sister, Esme, along. Her parents, fairies themselves, provide the girls with a slew of professional advice for getting the job done, the most important being that they must not be seen. On their mission, April and Esme run into some trouble when their client, Daniel wakes up and looks right at them before falling back asleep; fortunately, April, following some texted advice from Mom, manages to convince Daniel that it was a dream, and the girls return home in triumph. Graham, whose literary families are always bursting with cozy individuality, here offers a sweetly original tale that provides little ones a glimpse into the home life of tooth fairies. The use of a contemporary urban setting (the fairy family lives in a tiny home set against a stump alongside a busy highway) enticingly implies that magic is everywhere. There is abundant affection within the fairy family, and the typical parental ambivalence—they're hesitant to let their children out into the world, yet proud as heck upon their return—is well and credibly conveyed. The bijou world of the fairies is depicted in adorable detail, with elements that recall Norton's The Borrowers; nonetheless, its fairy denizens are depicted as regular, if tiny, people (Dad has a ponytail and a five o'clock shadow, Mom has a tattoo on her upper arm) with big wings on their backs, and the domestic familiarity will enchant little listeners. This is sure to be a hit with the wiggly-tooth set. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Tuberculosis (Biographies of Disease)

A great story has drama, mystery, conflict, interesting characters, intrigue, and excitement. The story of tuberculosis (TB) has all of these. It is a story of epic proportions. Carol Dyer’s Tuberculosis (Biographies of Disease) is not a textbook or a history book; it tells us the story of this fascinating but deadly disease. Dyer, a science writer, takes us from the mummies of ancient Egypt, with their visible signs of TB, to the skepticism that met Robert Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus, to today’s global TB public health emergency. Thought by many to be a disease of the past, the final chapters of the book jolt us into today’s reality. As the drama unfolds, Dyer describes how TB ravaged Europe’s working class during the industrial revolution. More personal accounts from the Romantic Age are especially interesting. She tells us how 6 siblings of the famed literary Bronte family died of TB. She describes the tragic death from TB of the poet John Keats at age 26. And the personal anecdotes continue; from the scientists who advanced our knowledge of TB to the artists whose lives and art were affected. By describing its influence on literature and the arts, Dyer brings to life the profound effects of TB on humanity. Her discussion of the victories and setbacks in the fight against TB provide a context for what she considers to be the story’s main plot: how is it possible that TB remains a leading cause of death from infectious disease globally? Her description of the complex biology of the organism and the societal characteristics of the disease help us understand why, despite the discovery of effective chemotherapy, TB continues to devastate. The final chapters provide a sobering picture of the current state of TB. Dyer describes the serious effect of the HIV epidemic on TB and warns of the alarming rates of more dangerous forms of drug-resistant TB. However, the story she tells ultimately becomes a hopeful one. She discusses how the world community has come together, leading to new funding initiatives and prevention and control strategies. This book is a quick and easy read (120 pages). However, the organization of its 8 chapters is peculiar. The reader might be tempted to skip to the third chapter on the history of TB or even stop reading, as he or she get bogged down in some of the medical details in the first 2 chapters. Occasional overuse of technical detail gets in the way of the story. Sidebars with anecdotes and scientific summaries, scattered throughout, are a nice addition to the format of the book. The timeline at the end is also helpful. The book falls short in describing the epidemiology of TB. More quantitative information would provide the reader with a better understanding of the magnitude of the problem. Despite this issue and several minor technical inaccuracies, the book is informative and at times exciting. It captures all the elements of this great story. Overall, this book is a great read for public health professionals and the general public. For the reader engaged in global public health efforts, the book should be a call to action.

Quasi-Professional Culture, Conservative Ideology, and the Narrative Structure of George Gissing's New Grub Street

Quasi-Professional Culture, Conservative Ideology, and the Narrative Structure of George Gissing's New Grub Street Stephen E. Severn (bio) Scholars have difficulty taking George Gissing at his word. When assessing the thematic and rhetorical implications of his narrative structures, many argue that the development of and resolution to his major novels should not be read literally to any significant extent. They downplay the importance of the narrated events that the reader encounters and instead look elsewhere for clues as to where the author's rhetorical agenda might lie. For instance, Simon James asserts that "it cannot be . . . the plot that creates and establishes the values the author wishes to promote. Gissing's model of Bildung always contains a structural gap between potential and fulfillment, the former suggested by the discourse and in the characters' own aspirations, the latter denied by the plot" (13). Adrian Poole echoes that stance in his analysis of the conclusion to New Grub Street, Gissing's masterful examination of the London literary world of the 1880's. He argues that the novel's conclusion should be understood as a discontinuity that is out of step with the essential narrative: "This final scene, so neat, so glib, is not the one demanded by the novel's internal logic. Gissing's deep, humane identification with those who are left outside requires that the final scene should belong to Marian, and her lonely, loveless vigil in the provincial library" (Poole 155). [End Page 156] The individual that Poole refers to is Marian Yule,1 perhaps the only completely admirable character in the novel. Born into a literary family, she toils in selfless obscurity for years as a researcher and ghostwriter for her father, Alfred Yule, a longtime editor and writer of limited abilities who has achieved relatively little success because he remains doggedly steadfast to the literary practices of an earlier time. Midway through the text, Marian encounters the first in a relentless series of personal disappointments when she learns that a long-anticipated inheritance from a wealthy uncle has been lost thanks to the failure of one of his creditors. Next, her engagement to an aspiring writer named Jasper Milvain collapses. Driven to succeed, Jasper has no qualms about producing sensationalist prose that is specifically designed to appeal to the vulgar reading tastes of the mass market. He shamelessly casts Marian off when he determines that she will hinder the progress of his literary career. To make matters worse, her father goes blind. His handicap deprives the family of its primary source of income, and Marian's subsequent efforts to earn extra money result in her suffering a series of nervous breakdowns. Finally, the Yules are forced to relocate from London to a "provincial town" where Marian ekes out a meager existence as a librarian and Alfred eventually dies. Although, as Poole's comments suggest, the reader learns Marian's ultimate fate in the last chapter of New Grub Street, the final scene does not belong to her. Instead, Gissing closes with Jasper, whose fortunes have taken a dramatically different turn from those of his former fiancé. Having finally achieved a modest level of success as a writer, he has married Amy Yule, a recent widow and cousin to Marian. Unlike Marian, the Milvains now live in relative comfort because Amy has received a ?10,000 inheritance from the same estate that failed to produce revenue for her cousin. The novel's last sentence shows Jasper drifting into a state of "dreamy bliss" as Amy sings and plays a song for him on their piano (551). Thus, like many nineteenth-century novels, the text closes on a note of supreme domestic tranquility. Yet here the resolution appears decidedly incongruous—even shocking—for it marks the complete triumph of the text's most self-centered character. Whereas the denouement of a Victorian novel would normally punish Jasper's behavior, New Grub Street seems to reward it. That apparent discontinuity produces the sense of consternation that is [End Page 157] palpable in the analyses of both Poole and James. Although such frustration is understandable, their arguments ultimately ring hollow. If, as James suggests, the plot "cannot" be said to...

Romantic literary families

Collaborative Dissent: Anna Barbauld and the Aikin School Walking 'Backwards and Forwards': The Wordsworths in 1802/1807 Incorporating the Literary Family Collaborative Co-Addicts Competing Houses The Godwins, the Shelleys, and the Genius Familiae

The Realization of Poetic Composition and Literary Conception: How the Creation and Development of Ye Xiaoluan Imagery Contributes to the Literature History

Being a real historic personage, Ye Xiaoluan 叶小鸾, a talented lady in late Ming dynasty, not only triggered a literary family’s calamity, but also became into a public topic of discussion by widely circulating Wumengtang ji, 梦堂集 (Collection of Noon Dream hall). She was clever and quick on the uptake, and excessively sentimental. Being romanced by her family, especially by Ye Shaoyuan 叶绍袁, her profile opened up a new outlook of literary conception, while her immortal sense and supernatural power, played up by Jin Shengtan’s 金圣叹 planchette writing, was endowed with romantic charm and rebelling appeal. Since being into Qing dynasty, Ye Xiaoluan had became the element for various literary works, but most of the works could simply simulate fairy tales or copy planchette words, except Honglou meng红楼梦 (Dream of the red chamber) could deeply expand this imagery’s literary grace and core value in light of cultural interest and aesthetics aspect. The development of Ye Xiaoluan’s imagery and its success on aesthetics clearly indicated a literary element’s roadmap and structural feature, also disclosed that writer’s personality, liking, even the ethics level, could make significant effect on the literary conception and compositional structure.

Literary families and family literature of the Song Dynasty

Families of literary fame in the Song Dynasty grew out of the economically or politically unprivileged or deprived families. Their ethical training by the family tradition made it a necessity for the literati to put moral integrity and ritual formality prior to everything else. Their education, which held book collecting and erudition in great importance, became resources that contributed a lot to the literary prosperity of the Song Dynasty. Both similarity and variation are found with the family literature of the Song Dynasty. Their similarity is reflected in the inheritance of and identification with the ancestral style of writing by later generations. But variation was also a norm, considering the difference of personal character and life experiences of a writer from those of his ancestors. Variation was also caused within familial literature by a liberal conception of literature and the freedom of writing at the time. In spite of that, the literature of different families had one thing in common—a great reverence for their ancestry and a sense of kinship.

Tracing an Anglo-American Literary Family Tree

Tracing an Anglo-American Literary Family Tree

Literary relations: kinship and the canon, 1660-1830

1. Fathers and Mentors 2. The Mighty Mother 3. Brothers, Sisters, and New Provinces of Writing 4. Women in the Literary Family

A Look at Irish-Ireland: Gael Linn's Amharc Eireann Films, 1956-64

Louis Marcus's 1996 documentary series, The Years of Change, provides a visual account of the changes in Ireland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Footage for the series was drawn from Gael Linn's Irish-language short documentary and news film series Amharc Éireann (A Look at Ireland, or A View of Ireland), which was produced by Colm Ó Laoghaire from 1956 to 1964. However, as Harvey O'Brien has argued, in the uncriticial use of this footage in The Years of Change, the period "is robbed of its specificity by historical distance, and has been commodified and repackaged in a sanitised form as tamed history."1 O'Brien called attention to the need to engage critically with the history represented in the Amharc Éireann series, and to assess the ideological and historical context in which it was originally filmed and distributed.2 That context is inseparable from the films' sponsoring organization, Gael Linn. Gael Linn began as a fund-raising project initiated by a small group of university students and graduates that, in effect, wanted to shame the government into paying more attention to the fate of the Irish language.3 The name Gael Linn is a play on words, meaning both "Irish pool," referring to the football pools or private members' lottery which was created to raise the funds, and "Irish with us," or "Our Irish," referring to Gael Linn's purposes of promoting Irish language and culture. After independence, the institutionalization of the Irish language and traditional culture by the conservative state—especially its heavy-handed and compulsion-oriented policy towards language revival—had dampened people's concern for the survival of Irish. In March, 1953, Dónall Ó Móráin, who came to be regarded as the founder of Gael Linn, recommended that an organization be formed under the patronage of Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge (Irish National Congress) to raise the funds for Irish film production. [End Page 17] Until the mid-1950s, the Irish cinema-going public saw almost exclusively foreign productions. Most films about Ireland, or movies filmed there, were produced by foreign companies, usually British or American. The newsreels that preceded the main features were those distributed by the British J. Arthur Rank Organization, which enjoyed a monopoly in Irish cinemas; there had never been an Irish-language documentary or news-film series of any kind made or shown in Irish cinemas. In 1956, Ó Móráin contacted Colm Ó Laoghaire to discuss the prospects for a series of monthly short Irish-language documentary films. Ó Móráin knew Ó Laoghaire from university as a long-time member of the Irish Film Society and as a nephew of Joseph Mary Plunkett, a hero of the 1916 Rising and a member of a well-known nationalist literary family interested in the language. Ó Laoghaire had recently discussed the need to produce films on 35mm for distribution in Irish cinemas with Vincent Corcoran, who had just acquired an Arriflex 35mm camera. Ó Móráin's original idea was to produce a weekly newsreel that would cover such political topics as party meetings and Dáil debates. Ó Laoghaire argued against this; he felt the resources were not available to generate enough material for a weekly series and the subject matter would be too boring for a cinema audience. He was concerned that Irish had come to be regarded as tiresome, given the association of the Irish language with compulsion. He was, for the same reason, determined to dissociate Irish approaches to making documentaries from those of John Grierson's British Documentary Movement, which he saw as entirely too rational and too British in tone and content for Irish Catholic sensibilities.4 Instead, they decided to produce a monthly series, each focusing on just one subject. These were conceived as "magazine-style...

Authority, honour and the Strachey family, 1817–1974*

Abstract The Strachey family, like other professional families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transformed concepts of honour and authority. Rather than rooting such concepts in the values of birth and wealth, the Stracheys realized and utilized the ironic possibilities in the conventions of their time to reshape their understanding of the ways that they fit into the world. The Stracheys were a literary family. In things Indian and imperial, in things French, and in psychoanalysis they negotiated the discontinuities and uncertainties of the modern world in their drive for power, place, meaning, intimacy and a different kind of authority.

Stephen Crane's literary family: a garland of writings

Little-known writings show how a rich family literory heritage influenced Stephen Crane's formative years, brief maturity, and artistry. Stephen Crane was a prodigious American author whose bohemian ways seemed to contradict his conscientious upbringing. Drawing on little-known and unpublished documents by Crane's father, mother, and sister, and preeminent scholar Thomas A. Gullason shows how their vitality and versatility galvanized Crane's imagination, spurred his literary career, and affected his lifestyle. The Cranes emerge as a spirited and serious lot who were passionately concerned with social and cultural issues of the day. Newly discovered papers - from reflections on the Civil War to a funeral oration for Lincoln - paint Crane's pastor father as a man of sardonic wit whose obsession with alcohol would be mirrored in his son's work. Crane's mother is revealed to have had an eye for politics and an ear for dialogue that would vastly inform Crane's masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage. His sister Agnes rounds out the portrait with recently recovered stories and poems. Replete with rare works and keen insights, this edition is a crucial reference for students of nineteenth-century American literature and devotees of Stephen Crane.

Silent witness? aileen palmer and the problem of evidence in lesbian history

Abstract How do we make sense of private lives and private papers? This article examines some of the issues that confronted the author when beginning to think about how to use Aileen Palmer's personal papers in the specific context of lesbian historiography. The article offers both a reading of the multiple life stories of Aileen Palmer (1915-1988), daughter of one of Australia's most famous literary families, and a reading of the author's own role as lesbian historian examining the nature of ‘evidence’ in the recovery of lesbian lives. Palmer's archive, lodged at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, raises in productive ways many of the major issues in lesbian history. In her reading of letters, drafts of novels, diaries and autobiographical fiction, the author of this article teases out the threads of alternative life stories that can be discerned in Aileen Palmer's private/public papers that point to her hidden history; a history she could not consign to total silence.