Middle-class Readers Research Articles

The Poetics of Pastiche in Eco's Postmodern Detective Novel

While the traditional boulevard novel of Eugène Sue wants to entertain and sell, Umberto Eco's boulevard novel wants to entertain and educate the contemporary reader in Italian history and in a form of modern semiotic theory. However, Eco's educational mission does not transform the low genre of the boulevard novel but remains bound by its limitations of “rhetoric and ideology.” Eco's reader is left with a representation of history as pastiche and a populist misconception about the potential of semiotics to relativise the perception of reality. Both history and semiotics are ultimately used by Eco not as heuristic devices but as instruments of seduction directed at a modern middle-class reading public with intellectual aspirations.

The Motherless Child in Pauline Hopkins's <i>Of One Blood</i>

[T]he desire of the mother is the origin of everything (283). Jacques Lacan, Antigone Between Two Deaths, 1960. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, A long ways from home; A long ways from home. (581) --African American spiritual As quoted in Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature In Pauline Hopkins's final novel, Of One Bloody her protagonist, Reuel Briggs, is a mixed-race man passing for white. When confronted with the racial identity he has inherited from his slave mother, Reuel responds emotionally: [Apparently struggling for words ... [he] ... fell on his knees in a passion of sobs agonizing to witness. 'You know then ... that I am Mira's son?' (593). By acknowledging his racial heritage and family history, Briggs reclaims his biological and national mother. This scene highlights a central theme in Hopkins's work: the restoration of the mother as a means of personal and national redemption. Hopkins anticipates Stuart Hall's delineation of a text's ability to impose imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas. As Hall explains,[B]y representing or 'figuring' Africa as the mother of these different civilizations, texts seek to an imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the of our (224-25). In Of One Blood, Hopkins imagines just such a restorative as she casts the African American community as motherless and counters the broken rubric of the African American past and present with a story of proud racial heritage and national entitlement made possible by the restoration of the national mother. We can understand Hopkins's focus on the community's relationship to the mother more fully through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. Treating the post-Reconstruction African American community--the community to which Pauline Hopkins belonged and for whom she primarily wrote--as the subject in Sigmund Freud's Oedipal model clarifies the position occupied by that group. In Hopkins's work, the rejected or absent mother figures as the cause of African Americans' alienation in the post-Reconstruction United States, but also, as we shall see, as a potential source of power. In what follows, I outline the trop of motherlessness as Hopkins appropriated and extended it, exploring its resonance via psychoanalytic models. I then read Of One Blood using these models, examining the motherlessness that signified national alienation and powerlessness and identifying how the mother is able to restore national identity and unity. THE MOTHERLESS CHILD Numerous scholars have detailed the nineteenth-century domestic ideology that placed mothers in an exalted position in both home ad society. (1) The popular domestic novel typically placed the mother at the center of its protagonist's development, often paradoxically highlighting the importance of her presence with her absence. Motherlessness posed a significant obstacle to overcome and constituted a lack that would prompt a powerful emotional response from readers. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe made some of her most poignant appeals to readers through characters such as young Harry, about to be torn from his adoring mother, Topsy, raised by a speculator and thus bereft of motherly guidance and love, and Eva, who learns to care for others despite the selfish neglect of her anti-mother, satirically named Marie. Stowe's strategy was for from idiosyncratic: Susan Warner's Ellen, Maria Susanna Cummins's Gerty, E. D. E. N. Southworth's Capitola, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Avis, and even Edith Wharton's Lily all experience the effects of motherlessness. If this trope appealed to a white, middle-class readership in the nineteenth-century United States, it may have resonated still more powerfully for African Americans, who had extensive experience with motherlessness. …

Nobody, Somebody, Everybody Ballet, Girlhood, Class, Femininity and Comics in 1950s Britain

<section class="abstract"> This article looks at girlhood in an historical and culturally specific context, through close textual analysis of a central narrative from a key British girls' comic of the 1950s. Girl, published by Hulton Press, predominantly addressed issues around femininity, girlhood and class in that period, often linking reading with other activities considered “appropriate” for girls. I will explore how Girl articulates gender and class and also how it encouraged the mainly middle-class readership to make ballet an important aspect of their cultural practice, popularising ballet classes across Britain. In doing so, I shall focus on the narrative, “Belle of the Ballet.” I will also look at other texts of the period, including Bunty, launched in 1958 by DC Thomson, and show how the representation of ballet changed in later comics for girls, relating this to shifting constructions of girlhood. </section>

Narcissism, Abjection and the Reader(e) of Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

Narcissism, Abjection and the Reader(e) of Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture by Jeannine Marie DeLombard, The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe by Sarah Robbins and Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture by Jo‐Ann Morgan

Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture Jeannine Marie DeLombard. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe Sarah Robbins. New York: Cambridge, 2007. Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture Jo-Ann Morgan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Three books published at the same time on virtually the same subject cover our desk with deliberations of American (and human) actions and abuses of other human beings. Slavery on Trial is essentially concerned with verbal and printed cultures. Before Civil War two powers pulled at society's attention and conduct. Legal actions and drove toward precedent and authority as interpreted by the printed word and precedent. At a time when the printed word used for entertainment and literature was suspect and legal practice and authority highly respected slavery was in fact practiced and condoned by an authority out of the reach and control of the people. What public there was generally consisted of newspapers and broadsides, which in DeLombard's words disproportionately featured malefactors of color (5). But any spread of language eventually weakened the institution of bondage. It was precisely through ... the appropriations of legal language and imagery that antebellum writers debated not only the status of Southern slavery but the place of African Americans in the national polity (2). DeLombard ends a rich and exhaustive study of the changing role of language in the altering behavior of Americans with a tight summary: Troubled though it may have been, the practice of imagining the debate over slavery as a vast, ongoing trial had made antebellum print culture a forum for interracial collaboration while providing an alternate vision of race and justice under American law-at its most forward-looking, that still-elusive vision of full black civil inclusion (222). In The Cambridge Introduction of Harriet Beecher Stowe Robbins tries to encompass an active and influential life in less than 150 pages. And she succeeds. She uses four chapters: (1) Life; (2) Cultural Contexts; (3) Works; (4) Reception and Critics. In the nineteenth century women were systematically excluded from because it was thought they were incapable of doing anything except, in Hawthorne's blind words scribbling. Stowe, however, was one of many exceptions. She became one of the driving forces not only in producing but also of fighting for a noble cause, that of slavery. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, unquestionably Stowe's most lasting book, the author was writing for a white middleclass readership, that is, her neighbors, for whatever political and moral forces they might bring to bear, and therefore she set the stage in portraits and developments that white readers would have recognized. The results were, of course, playing on precisely the most powerful heart strings of her readers. This powerful work, published first in the magazine National Era upon being published as a book became the most popular book of the time except the Bible. In this brief book of Stowe's career Robbins discusses Stowe's other numerous books and her dedication to other causes, authorship of Dred, The Christian Slave, the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, her regional writings and such nonliterary activities as her defense of Lady Byron. …

CONSUMER MAGAZINES IN SOUTH AFRICA AND ISRAEL

The magazine appears to have been directed at a modernising, middle-class reading public actively engaged in promoting a culture of consumption. But this paper inquires into two sets of socio-cultural environments in which official, political economic determinants cannot fully account for the rise and successful publication of consumer magazines, nor for the consolidation of an operative magazine industry. The cases concern consumer magazines for black South Africans published roughly from the onset of apartheid to the present, and Israeli women's magazines published from the time of early-state Zionist-Socialist discourse till today. In neither case does the production of consumer magazines correspond with straightforward political economy analyses. To assess the cultural functionality and social standing of magazines, the paper takes a socio-semiotic approach incorporating socio-cultural determinants entailed in the way the consolidation of a commercial press comes to bear on the (re)production of individual selfhood and collective identity.

Useless Subjects: Reading and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth‐Century Germany

Books have always been considered dangerous by some, but rarely as dangerous as in late eighteenth-century Germany. The meteoric growth of the market for books and periodicals in this period not only gave rise to a literary public sphere; it also triggered wide-ranging and often hysterical fears of a epidemic among German intellectuals and other educated elites. These fears have attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention over the years, with more recent studies generally addressing the topic from the perspective of the history of genre, class conflict, or gender politics. Commentators like Erich Schon have made it clear how significant the discussions of Lesesucht and Lesewut are for our understanding of the history of reading, and how our own notions of what it means to be a reader, especially a reader of novels, take shape in this period. Others have emphasized eighteenth-century concerns about the politicization of readers from the lower social strata following the French Revolution or about women readers who allegedly neglect the duties of motherhood.1 The discussion of these facets of the controversy has certainly been illuminating, but the emphasis on drawing distinctions among text genres or social groups has tended to narrow scholarly focus, whereas the scope of the controversy itself seems to demand a more comprehensive approach. Despite the frequent singling out of certain groups or genres for condemnation, one cannot help but be struck by how widespread concerns about reading and textuality were throughout Germany in the late eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century: how many commentators expressed them (from Wieland to Friedrich Schlegel, from Mendelssohn to Fichte), how many different text genres came under suspicion (from novels to plays to political journalism), and how many different groups were seen to be at risk (not just young people, peasants, and women, but also adult middle-class readers of both sexes). In the following contribution, I propose that we take a step back from the focused types of analysis mentioned above in order to adopt a more holistic view of the anxieties about reading, a view that builds upon recent work done on consumer culture in eighteenth-century Germany (e.g., Purdy; Wurst, Fabricating Pleasure). These anxieties, I would argue, although clearly linked to the expansion of the book market, are best understood as one strand of a much broader confrontation with an emerging commercial society. Reflections on reading are inseparable from broader reflections on surplus consumption in the period, and recognizing this shared conceptual framework can help us grasp why the alleged addiction was a source of such distress. In addition, it can also help illuminate an aspect of the more general eighteenth-century discourse on consumer culture that has often been neglected in the burgeoning scholarship on the topic. Because critiques of excessive reading address the relation between consumption and psychology in such detail, they demonstrate with particular clarity that anxieties regarding the spread of consumer culture are inseparable from the perceived negative impact of market capitalism. More specifically, they show how the spread of market mechanisms posed a challenge to a particular conception of subjective authenticity, one based on the principle of a harmonious balance among the various actions, behaviors, and attitudes seen to constitute the self. The reading debates, when viewed from this perspective, help remind us that there is more at stake in early condemnations of consumerism than issues of social hierarchy and social differentiation, which have traditionally constituted the focus of studies on the topic (Slater 68-70; Smith 8-9; Meyer 73-74). Finally, and perhaps most significantly, recognizing the crucial status of subjective authenticity in this context simultaneously opens up a new perspective from which to consider the romantic model of textual hermeneutics that emerges around the end of the century. …

Reading and the Difference it Makes

SUPPOSE THE EASIEST, AND MOST GLIB, therefore most important answer to the questions Why do have to read? or Why do have to read that? or Why do have to read like that? is, quite simply, you don't: you don't have to read anything, there is no instrumental value in reading in the ways in which we teach, or teach, indeed there may be no pleasure no net result, no learning outcome, no increase in income. And then for the question or larger questions of reading, with this--not so much uselessness or disinterestedness--with this admission in mind, would take on three tangents or angles of attack (as we used to say when was in ground school): the relationship between reading class or labour; reading versus writing the biblical idea of eating the book; the Lacanian/Zizekian idea of interpassivity, or the Subject supposed to read. And this subject supposed to read one might begin with, in terms of class, anecdotally, when was visiting my sister a few years ago and, seeing me with the newspaper open, a friend of hers said, Readin' again, eh?, which has become a sort of mantra around my household since. But really this class notion I'd like to reference with a title of mine, my first collection of poetry from ECW Press in 1997, the Be Labour Reading, a title chose because it seemed to encapsulate neatly (perhaps too neatly) the paradox that difficult writing (and the notion of how easy it is, perhaps to difficult texts), which is to say formally innovative or experimental writing, which is difficult to read, to make sense of or to navigate oneself in, was a kind of writing that obtained its cultural capital at the expense of the reader's economic capital: the texts were belaboured because the reader would be labour (and perhaps the other way around), a condition made all the more tragic or ironic or paradoxical as proceeded to spend the next eleven years being paid to read in the precarious job market of sessional academic labour. And this necessitates saying why am against learning outcomes (because of their instrumentality) why am against being against learning outcomes (because of the elitism of university pedagogy). Here John Guillory's Cultural Capital is useful for how it argues that we must consider postsecondary questions of the canon the syllabus in connection with the secondary school system, a connection with all the more resonance to me because part of what do at SFU is teach graduate courses to high-school teachers returning for an MA in English, but also because of the hierarchies of reading involved in the sessional composition college system--which is to say reading as marking. Then, this connects with a different kind of work as reading, the notion of class, which troubles me because of how it seems as if am saying that a text that is difficult to read will be more off-putting to a working-class reader than to a middle-class reader, which is clearly nonsense. That is, the kind of texts that value, that enjoy reading, those associated, if we are talking about late twentieth early twenty-first century writing, with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing the Kootenay School of Writing (how apropos that ACCUTE the Vancouver Writers' Festival, or the academy the market, both choose to ignore the local--of course, bpNichol Nicole Brossard Steve McCaffery are read--a bit--the canonized 70s) call into question just how reading functions in a globalized, mediatized culture of Empire: Oppositionally, the car became known as him. Without can happen in: plural pushes skips time zones, adds class to voice. This waiting compresses that time, appends archaeology to the afternoon. Metal rattle. So really Sunday is postponed, rendered as retch. A W over the city, spinning for commerce. Jeff Derksen, Solace But to quickly shift gears, if we would rather than read, this is a long-standing desire, of course, one that goes back to the of Revelations, to the famous scene in Chapter lo where St John is confronted with a mighty angel holding a book in his hand--for some reason it seems important that the be little--a mighty angel who spoke with seven thunders in his voice; St John says I was about to (10:4) immediately is told write them not (10:4) but instead to take the little and eat it up; it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey (10:9) which indeed it is. …

The Aristocrat in the Mirror: Male Vanity and Bourgeois Desire in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair

39 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old R´gime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Doubleday, 1955), pp. 88-89.Taking their cue from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833-34), scholars of Regency and early-Victorian dandyism have focused on a supposed opposition between the dandyism of a declining aristocracy and the moral earnestness of a rising bourgeoisie. This historical model obscures the full complexity of relations between the nineteenthcentury British bourgeoisie and aristocracy, a complexity that can be illuminated by a closer examination of William Makepeace Thackeray's works. Thackeray's novels and sketches, which are surprisingly filled with middle-class dandies (such as Vanity Fair's George Osborne and Jos Sedley) and vigorous, hypermasculine aristocrats (such as Vanity Fair's Rawdon Crawley), reverse the Victorian literary stereotypes of effete aristocrats and manly bourgeoisie. Focusing particularly on Vanity Fair (1847- 48) and on Thackeray's sketch journalism, I seek to understand why Thackeray repeatedly depicts bourgeois men who are feminized both by their vanity and by their homosocial-even homoerotic-desire for more powerful aristocratic men. My essay places Thackeray's works within recent historiographical models that emphasize the fusion of, rather than the opposition between, the nineteenth-century British bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Protesting against this fusion in the name of bourgeois independence, Thackeray indicts the British middle classes for their obsession with aristocratic concepts of gentility,a phenomenon that he was the first to label "snobbism." For Thackeray, I argue, the comic trope of bourgeois male vanity becomes an especially powerful device for critiquing"snobbism." By calling upon the scandalous figure of the mirror-gazing man,Thackeray attempts to shock his middle-class readers into acknowledging the artificial and performative nature of their own class personae.

Freaks and the American Dream: Horatio Alger, P. T. Barnum, and the Art of Humbug

my belief that you're a humbug, said disappointed customer. Thank you, sir, said Rough and Ready; I've been takin' lessons of Barnum, only I haven't made so much money yet. ... Don't do it again, my lad. It's wrong humbug people, you know. By way, do you ever come museum? Yes, sir. Well, your joke is worth Here is a season ticket for three months. --Horatio Alger, Rough and Ready When Horatio Alger lets P. T. Barnum suddenly appear as a character in Rough and Ready, fourth volume of his Ragged Dick series, he hints at a significant connection between Barnumesque humbug and his own fiction. (1) In Chapter XV, which introduces a distinguished personage (167), newsboy Rough and Ready not only dishes up humbug customer looking for coverage of horrible disasters, but he also falsely claims that P. T. Barnum, who happens be walking by, is Horace Greeley. The duped gentleman, who keeps a seminary in country, eagerly speaks with Barnum as if he were Greeley, commending him on his luminous editorials and their satisfactory exposition of principles which I profess (172). Barnum goes along with joke but confronts newsboy afterwards, chiding him that to humbug people is wrong. Nonetheless, in same breath he also rewards boy with a free season pass because the joke is worth something. Overtly, deception compares Horace Greeley's journalism Barnum's humbug; but, less directly, Alger might also be speaking about himself and his attempt capitalize as a fiction writer on lessons in art of humbug he learned from P. T. Barnum. (2) This essay argues that similarities between Alger's fictional practices and P. T. Barnum's exhibition strategies are central in understanding both nature and success of Alger's most famous and quintessential rags-to-riches story, Ragged Dick (1868)--a context critics have overlooked. On surface, Alger shows that Dick's education and improvement depend on his abandoning his favorite pleasures, such as going Barnum's and low theaters. Yet Dick's success, and success of novel, have much do with popularity and dynamics of freak shows. Partially designed by himself and partially by Alger, Dick is a freak, and our pleasure of reading about him is similar pleasure he himself seeks when he visits Barnum's museum. Ragged Dick is, like Tom Thumb, a charming miniature man, and his poverty and homelessness become curious and entertaining within this reduced scale. By offering his rags-to-riches story, novel allowed its middle-class readers indulge their curiosity and face and appease fears about pressing social issues such as extreme urban poverty, immigration, rise and threat of finance capitalism and its concomitant social mobility and fluidity. Ragged Dick's astounding success can be traced not so much professed message that any honest boy can make it respectability and obtain American dream with a lot of determination and a little bit of luck as way in which novel, while professing this message, is also able imply almost its direct opposite, namely that Dick is a freak and American dream of rising from rags fiches a freak event. Dick's rise is an example of formidable Barnumesque humbug that happens only those whom middle-class audience enjoys and for whose performance they are willing pay. Alger's Anti-Freak Show Message Explicitly, Alger's novel, like his character Barnum, considers all forms of humbug wrong; narrator notes that Dick's greatest flaw is his love for entertainment and way he squanders his money on shows and spectacles. The novel opens with Dick waking up late because he had gone Old Bowery previous night. Another of Dick's faults, Alger's narrator explains, was his extravagance. …

Brean hammond and shaun regan. Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–1789. Pp. xii + 268. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. £14.99.

Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan's intelligent, readable study of the early British novel addresses a far broader range of primary texts than any recent comparable work. The sheer diversity of their subject matter calls to mind Henry James’ famous remark in the preface to Roderick Hudson: ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.’ This remark is frequently held up as the perfect expression of the challenge facing novelists, but it applies no less to critics and historians of the novel. The volume and scope of relevant material are dizzying and need to be arranged into some kind of narrative. The most influential story-teller so far has been Ian Watt, whose The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957) suggested that the emergence of a middle-class reading public provided the impetus for a shift in the nature of prose fiction. This new constituency of readers found their own interests reflected in the form and content of the novels they bought. The defining characteristic of these works is ‘formal realism’, and this definition allows Watt to draw his circle very small, abandoning or ignoring much eighteenth-century literature in formulating his narrative. The Rise of the Novel is thus a work of fiction in the most basic sense of the word: ‘a thing framed or fashioned’. This version of events has stuck, and almost 50 years later the book remains the first port of call for students of the novel.

Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature Anne Rodrick (bio) Lynn M. Alexander , Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. viii+257, $44.95 cloth. The Victorian seamstress came to occupy an unusual and significant position as a cultural symbol of working-class suffering and redemption. So [End Page 430] argues Lynn Alexander, professor of English at the University of Tennes-see–Martin, in this careful study of periodical literature, novels, governmental reports, and visual arts, in which the problem of the needlewoman occupied center stage. Alexander tracks the evolution of the iconography of the "distressed needlewoman" from the early 1840s, when she was one among many of the preoccupations of social reformers addressing the human suffering omnipresent within the industrializing city, to the 1870s, by which time her image was so well known that painters and writers merely needed to mention her existence to evoke a host of expectations and responses. Alexander makes a persuasive case that the needlewoman was eventually adopted as a symbol of working-class suffering despite and even because of her historical roots as a member of the displaced middle classes. Needlework offered the only morally and socially acceptable alternative to middle-class women without resources who lacked the education to become governesses. These women labored to earn a living because their fathers had fallen on hard times or had died and left their daughters without support; thus, they fell into a broadly conceptualized working class solely because of material need, through no fault of their own, and continued to evoke notions of both gentility and middle-class domesticity without suggesting the threat of misbehavior or violence implicit in the male working classes. The needlewoman's example was especially compelling for the middle-class readers of the government reports, novels, and articles in which she appeared, because it took little effort to imagine oneself or one's sisters in her position. Alexander divides the treatment of the seamstress into distinct chronological periods, noting the first appearance of the milliner as a figure of fiction in 1833. The 1843 Second Report of the Childhood Employment Commission provided an arsenal of information about the poor health and working conditions of needlewomen, and fiction writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna mined the Report in order to add power to their portrayals of exhaustion, starvation, and consumption as milestones on the way to early death. Thomas Hood's poem "The Song of the Shirt," first appearing in Punch in December 1843, further focused public attention upon the plight of the lone shirt-maker and inspired several generations of visual artists. Fictive portrayals after 1843, however, began to reshape the needlewoman so that she might serve as a symbolic as well as an actual representative of working poverty. Thus, even as the figure of the needlewoman evolved from distressed middle class to representative working class, her workplace was transformed from milliner's shop to slopworker's solitary garret, her work shifted from expensive finery to ready-to-wear men's shirts, and the solution to her distress moved away from changed behavior on the part of the woman client (whose impossible [End Page 431] demands led to overwork and illness) to government reforms initiated by the male legislator. A second wave of literature and visual arts further emphasized the seamstress as an intermediary between rich and poor and as a link between the idyllic rural past and the industrial present, and set forth the seamstress as morally pure even when forced into prostitution by economic pressures. Governmental reports and editorials during this second wave treated the needlewoman not only as a representative of the working poor but also as part of the larger category of the "redundant woman" who was urged to emigrate to Canada or to Australia. By the 1850s, the figure had become a stereotype and ceased to provide a focus for serious novels and poetry, and within another decade, "the seamstress was considered to be a hackneyed subject" (181) for writers and appeared primarily as a "stock portrait" in the visual arts. By the last quarter of the century, argues Alexander, "The seamstress...

MODERNISM AND THE COMMON WRITER

This article re-examines the resistance to literary modernism in interwar Britain from the angle of popular literary theory and practice. Drawing on the papers of some of the notable working-class writers of this period, it disputes Jonathan Rose's claim that a rejection of modernist ‘obscurantism’ was a response distinctive to working-class autodidacts. Moreover, many middle-class readers responded to modernism in the same terms that Rose takes to be peculiar to a working-class intelligentsia. Negative reactions to modernism are better explained as a response conditioned by a literary discourse in which plebeian autodidacts as well as middle-class readers participated. The article approaches this discourse via the aspiring authors who joined writing clubs in the interwar period. Because these people were at once fairly typical readers and writers, their ideas and practices disclose more about popular understandings of literature than debates in the national press or literary reviews do. Their ideas about what constituted good writing and their hostility to modernism were underpinned by a popular conception of literature that derived from English romanticism.

Angers, Fantasies and Ghostly Fears: Nineteenth-Century Women from Wales and English-Language Poetry by Catherine Brennan (review)

MLRy 100.3, 2005 791 English literature of the Revolutionary period outside the precincts of the useful, although occasionally limiting, tag of 'Romantic'. As Wood notes, with characteristic assurance, the 'values of Romanticism?individualism, solitude, passion, imagina? tion, nonconformity?tend to conflict with prevalent ideologies of femininity of the period, or the material circumstances of women's lives'. From the pursuit of such principles, women writers are 'almost necessarily excluded' (p. 20). Wood pays particular attention to the narrative voice that her writers adopt in their novels, and, although sensitive to the nuances inherent in political terminology, largely defines a conservative approach as one that supports anti-radicalism and endorses 'containing female activity within a redefined domestic sphere' (p. 117). Her analysis is a judicious and sensitive engagement with the paradox that writers such as More wrote novels that endorsed feminine obedience and meek retirement yet were themselves vigorous public figures, successful businesswomen and self-promoters. In an incisive examination of More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife, Wood argues that More's devotion to such principles rendered her novel acceptable to the 'respectable' middle classes, who would ordinarily refuse to read fiction.As Wood neatly concludes, More's location ofthe 'power forshaping narrative events' in 'mentorial fatherfigures' works to counteract the 'potential corruption she and others perceived in the generic form' of the novel (p. 92). To her credit, Wood does not shy away from noting that the principle is complicated when the writer, as in the case of Jane West, employs a feminine narrative voice (p. 117), although she has not permitted herself quite enough pages to examine the extent of these complications. Wood's interest in narrative voice creates an organized and purposeful study and is a useful way of examining texts by authors who, as she claims, perceived both 'originality and individualism as problematic concepts' (p. 62). We might question, however, whether a text written out of a conservative agenda was necessarily read as such. Not only might a reader's individual endorsement of a conservative viewpoint encompass a spectrum of values and expectations, but those middle-class readers that Wood suggests esteemed More's traditionalism eagerly consumed many novels that suggested an expansion of female activity past the domestic sphere, albeit often through the vehicle of romance. It would have been interesting to see some of the reactions of contemporary reviewers and readers to the works of More, West, Porter, and others, and I would have particularly welcomed some investigation into the publishers and the marketing strategies used to promote the fiction of such women writers. This small caveat aside, Modes of Discipline is an impressively taut and coherent argument and an excellent introduction to texts that, as Wood notes, are mostly out of print. One hopes that criticism as compelling as this volume will encourage publishers to produce affordable editions ofthe works of Hamilton, West, More, Porter, and other conservative women writers. As Wood's study proves, these fascinating and muchoverlooked novels hold great potential rewards forthe student and the general reader alike. Somerville College, Oxford Kate Williams Angers, Fantasies and Ghostly Fears: Nineteenth-Century Women from Wales and English-Language Poetry. By Catherine Brennan. Cardiff: University ofWales Press. 2003. viii + 237pp. ?14.99. ISBN 0-7083-1764-2. The seven poets assessed by Catherine Brennan in Angers,Fantasies and GhostlyFears were selected because 'their experiences exemplify a spectrum of diverse species of Welshness' (p. 4). Her chosen writers are Jane Cave, Ann Julia Hatton, Felicia 792 Reviews Hemans, Maria James, Sarah Williams, Emily Jane Pfeiffer, and Anna Walter Thomas, and their dates span the period from c. 1754 to 1920. This was, of course, a time of momentous social change and upheaval, and Brennan writes knowledgeably about the historical background. The women were not all Welsh by birth, but the author focuses on their experiences of Wales and their strong emotional links with the country. She claims that they 'were marginalized doubly, by their gender and by their nationality, from the dominant dis? course of imperialist British patriarchy' (p. 3). Brennan is motivated by her belief that Welsh literature of the nineteenth century has been neglected; therefore, following the pioneering achievements of...

A Tramp at Home

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) contains the materials for a wide-ranging analysis of the different and competing understandings of American manhood in the nineteenth century and the ways in which men might interact with each other and love each other. In order to understand better the sexual and emotional dynamics of the novel, we must understand the other kinds of writings about men alone and together that Twain was responding to. In this essay I place Twain's classic novel in two nineteenth-century discursive contexts that have been obscured in the existing criticism: the fiction of romantic friendship and the public debate on the homeless man. Huckleberry Finn may be seen as the reverse of the medal of normative, middle-class masculinity in Victorian America and as a counterpoint to the more conventional, idealized accounts of romantic friendship in the works of several of Twain's contemporaries and rivals. I suggest that while Huck and Jim negotiate an uncommon type of romantic friendship across barriers of race and generation, the duke and the dauphin appear as a grotesque parody of high-minded "brotherly love." By co-opting some of the conventions of romantic friendship fiction, Twain decreased the distance between his underclass characters and middle-class readers. Yet by writing and publishing the first novel about tramps during a period of heightened national concern about homeless men, Twain increased the topicality and popular appeal of what was, in its initial American publication in 1885, a subscription book that needed an element of sensationalism in order to sell.

Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques

This essay is a literary and cultural study of Canada’s bestselling but largely forgotten poet of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Edna Jaques. It argues that Jaques’s preference for sentimental verse and the largely western Canadian, female, and middle-class readership that bought her books combine to relegate Jaques outside of English-Canadian literary history as a middlebrow anti-modernist embarrassment. Examples of her verse are situated in the rhetorical context of sentimental greeting cards and the economic context of female cultural consumption to map the intersections of gender, class, and race in the battles over literary taste and modern nation swirling around Jaques’s popular success and critical failure.

Victorian Culture Wars: Alexander Smith, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Matthew Arnold in 1853

EVEN AS MATTHEW ARNOLD WAS PUBLISHING HIS FIRST TWO VOLUMES of poetry (anonymously, in 1849 and 1852), he appears to have been fighting what we might well perceive, early in twenty-first century, as culture war. Arnold's famous Preface to his 1853 Poems suggests that most powerful enemies of poetic principles he formulates there, and (as I hope to demonstrate) of his foundational philosophical, moral, and spiritual values, are phenomenally popular Spasmodic poets, or, as Arnold terms them in his Preface, the school of Keats. In fact, Arnold's Preface, which has traditionally been read as poetic and aesthetic manifesto, is, in addition, political manifesto. As generally negative reviews of Arnold's work that appeared between 1849 and 1853 make clear, Arnold's literary and aesthetic values, his taste, opposed that of most middle-class readers of poetry and fiction. As has been frequently discussed, most of those reviews damn Arnold's work with faint praise; poetry, although (as Clough himself characterized it) that of a scholar and gentleman, (1) is described as out of tune with modern world, self-absorbed, uselessly erudite. About 1849 volume, Charles Kingsley asked, To what purpose [is] all through which author must have passed, given that poems present only dreamy, transcendental excuses for laziness in their domination by hungry abstractions ... stolen from dregs of German philosophy? (2) And William Edmonstoune Aytoun, who two years after publication of Empedocles was to explode Spasmodic fad through his Blackwood's parody of their work, attacked Arnold's volume as perversion of taste which, with so much should have been capable of better things. (3) One reviewer was distressed that fellow Oxonian, a man of high culture, should be so alienated from his generation and should through his verse propound an indolent, selfish quietism. (4) Clough himself questioned Arnold's ascetic and timid self-culture (Armstrong, Scrutinies, p. 167). Such comments are typical of reviews of Arnold's work from 1849 and 1852 and present remarkable contrast, as we shall see, with tone and content of responses to Alexander Smith's Poems, published on heels of Arnold's volume. The responses to Smith's work were effusive. By March of 1853 Arnold had, it seems, read many of reviews and appears at first to take quietist stance in response to them. In letter to his intimate friend, Arthur Hugh Clough, of March 21, Arnold espouses kind of aesthetic relativism that is powerfully belied by direction and force of his later prose writings on such matters, including Preface to his 1853 volume (the first book he published under his own name). Of Clough, just several months before writing Preface, Arnold queried, What is to be said when thing does not suit you--suiting and not suiting is subjective affair and only time determines, by colour thing takes with years, whether it ought to have suited or no. (5) Such view may have eased Arnold's displeasure, not to say bafflement, at reviews of both The Strayed Reveller (in 1849) and Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems. But he had not yet seen Clough's, which appeared in July issue of North American Review. Reading Clough's review as in itself text for ideological analysis instructs us in highly significant cultural conflict embedded in reception history of Arnold's and Smith's works in 1853 and reified in Arnold's 1853 Preface. While reviews of Arnold's Empedocles were somewhat slow to appear, Smith's Poems was immediately and widely reviewed. A sensation of winter season, it was rushed into second edition soon after first printing. William Michael Rossetti, in fact, insisted that, during spring of 1853, nothing [was] talked of ... but Alexander Smith. (6) Dante Rossetti called A Life-Drama wonderful and compared it to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. …

Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques

This essay is a literary and cultural study of Canada’s bestselling but largely forgotten poet of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Edna Jaques. It argues that Jaques’s preference for sentimental verse and the largely western Canadian, female, and middle-class readership that bought her books combine to relegate Jaques outside of English-Canadian literary history as a middlebrow anti-modernist embarrassment. Examples of her verse are situated in the rhetorical context of sentimental greeting cards and the economic context of female cultural consumption to map the intersections of gender, class, and race in the battles over literary taste and modern nation swirling around Jaques’s popular success and critical failure.

Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon

Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon

Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City

William Dean Howells's novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) presents a haunting sense of New York as a divided city. The novel's protagonist, Basil March, an aesthetically minded journalist, delights in Bowery's gay ugliness, its shapeless, graceless, reckless picturesqueness (183). March relishes every interesting shape of shabby adversity he encounters, from bare, cue-filleted skulls of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese, to [t]he colossal effigies of fat women tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums (183). In Bowery's frantic panorama March perceives the fierce struggle for survival, a struggle waged against deformity, mutilation, destruction, decay (184). He watches as a Christian mother is wheeled down Mott Street in a cart by two policemen, followed by a crowd of swarming shrieking children (186). A later walk down Madison Avenue on a Sunday afternoon presents March with a radically different spectacle, one of fashion, richness, indigeneity (301). Their silk hats shone, he observes of promenaders, and their boots; their frocks had right distension behind, their bonnets perfect poise distinction (302). But March decides he prefers Mott Street. In a characteristically glib effort to convert socioeconomic facts into aesthetic qualities, he tells his wife, 'I understand now why poor people don't come up here live in this clean, handsome, respectable quarter of town; they would be bored to death' (302). Howells's narrative works to reiterate what had already become, by late nineteenth century, a well-established topography of New York as a city polarized between opulent rich degraded poor, its citizens occupying self-contained, noncommunicating worlds (Blumin 18). Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of Streets (1893) initially adopts this point of view. Crane's characters inhabit brutal, lower-class realm of Bowery tenement, recently opened up to a middle-class readership by Jacob Riis's How Other Half Lives (1890): a world of dark stairways tattered gamins, of howls curses, groans shrieks (Crane, Maggie 7, 3, 11).