The Little Professor

Bloodthirsty

Despite the many Gothic links in the sidebar, I'm not really a Gothic literature person, except insofar as the genre contributes both to the historical novel and to anti-Catholic propaganda. But I somehow wandered into Melinda Hayes' Vampire Resource Page, which has more vampire information than you can shake a clove of garlic at. Check out the massive bibliography devoted to Continental vampire literatures. For Bram Stoker, there's Dracula's Home Page--probably the king of serious Dracula sites. The Lord Ruthven Pages reprint John Polidori's and Lord Byron's vampire tales; here's a popular drama based on Polidori's work. While J. S. LeFanu doesn't seem to be doing very well on the home page front, Literary Gothic has some useful pointers, including links to a slew of e-texts. If you want to travel a bit further down the literary food chain, the University of Virginia has kindly digitized Thomas Prest's (in)famous Varney the Vampire.

Victorian serial fiction

Here's an excellent short essay on Dickens and serial fiction by Robert L. Patten, the director of the Dickens Project.

No comment(s)

The Guardian reports on a new scheme to stave off an onslaught of students challenging their final honours ranking: the Oxford administration has asked history tutors to shred their final exam "marking notes" in order to keep them out of the students' hot little hands. Aside from finding this rather extreme ("Machiavellian" gets thrown around a bit in this article), this American academic is a bit puzzled: does this mean Oxford students are simply ranked at the end with no explanation whatsoever? I know that the examination system for awarding honors at Oxford is nothing like the system at most universities at the US, where the student can graduate with honors based on overall GPA, but it sounds like Oxford simply expects students to take what they get. Or is there some feedback mechanism I'm missing here?

Revisions! Revisions!

Who, day and night, must proofread (to get tenure),
Change the accidentals, cite the proper texts?
And who has to fight, as writer of the book,
To finish as the deadline looms?

The author, the author! Revisions!
The author, the author! Revisions!

Things I've been reading in order to put off working on my index, none of them Victorian

• PZ Myers reminisces about the graduate instructor from hell. While I never had an experience even remotely resembling his, Myers does make an important point: sometimes the Professor from the Ninth Circle of the Inferno turns out, in retrospect, to have shaped your development in crucial ways.

• At The Panda's Thumb, we find another installment in the Saga of the Deanonymized Amazon Self-Reviewers. This time, it's Intelligent Design theorist William Dembski. If you're going to review yourself anonymously, you could at least follow Sir Walter Scott's lead and write a serious piece of criticism.

• The Cranky Professor follows up on Timothy Burke by talking about the problem of "voice." As both of them point out, the quest for "authentic" voices of whatever type often runs aground on a number of shoals, ranging from the textual to the accidental. In the book MS that I'm avoiding even as we speak (type?), I point out that it's difficult to find a "female" voice in Victorian popular texts that rely heavily on boilerplate, recycled ideas and just downright plagiarism.

• Academicgame is also departing academia, although not shutting down her site.

• Making Light provokes an interesting comments thread on the life and death cycles of independent bookstores. The area around the University of Chicago has a wonderful run of indies, like the Seminary Co-Op. In the six years I lived there, I can remember two stores going out of business: one a mediocre chain store in a bad location (53rd Street, the main shopping area but too far away from all the other bookstores); the other a general secondhand shop which had a hard time competing with Powell's and O'Gara's for inventory. Downtown, one indie on S. Michigan died when Waterstone's came in; Waterstone's itself got done in shortly afterwards by Borders. (Or is it a Barnes & Noble? I've been away too long...) A couple of secondhand indies also vanished or mutated: Rain Dog Books, which had sky-high prices, is now a coffee shop with books attached, while Booksellers Row either moved or disappeared in a puff of smoke. A couple of commentators in the thread have pointed to Acres of Books in Long Beach, a store I visit a couple times of year when I'm staying with my parents. I wish that they were more careful in their purchasing decisions--I picked up a nice six-volume edition of William Robertson a few years ago, but there's just too much "lumber" (as one of the book collectors in my department says). The Book Baron, which sat right next to AoB, went out of business last year; I don't know if its larger Anaheim store, which had a better (albeit slightly overpriced) stock, is still extant.

• Dorothea Salo muses on the ethics of turning out more Ph.Ds. I'm not sure how it follows that obtaining a Ph.D. will somehow lead to turning out other Ph.Ds--most faculty will never see a Ph.D. candidate--but the larger question is a good one.

• I got a chuckle out of Adam Kotsko's parody of Derrida.

• The Reading Experience ponders The New York Review of Books, and finds himself distinctly unenthused.

Calling all Microsoft Word mavens

Usually, I can handle complex formatting without breaking a sweat. Not too much of a sweat, anyway. (Sort of a light dew.) But I'm about to confess defeat.

Since The Book MS is CRC, I need to fix various issues in the formatting. One of the issues involves the size of footnote numbers. Sounds easy, right? Just highlight, click on font size and fix.

Yeah, sure.

MS Word is convinced that footnote X in the Introduction, set in Times New Roman 9, is smaller than footnote X in Chapter One, set in Times New Roman 8. In fact, the footnote in Times New Roman 8 appears to be in Times New Roman 10. But I can't convince MS Word of this salient detail.

Suggestions? Anyone?

(Insert pathetic sob here.)

This Week's Acquisitions

(More free books this week.)

• May Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (Modern Library, 2003). The tragic effects of a late-Victorian upbringing on a young woman's self-consciousness.

  
  

• Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth Century British Literature (Rutgers, 1990). 19th c. medievalism, especially the afterlife of the Norman Conquest.

  
  

• Frederick Holmes, The Historical Imagination: Postmodernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction (ELS, 1997). New trends in historical fiction, with special attention to Ackroyd, Byatt, Fowles and Lively.

  
  

• David Patterson, The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel (Kentucky, 1992). Bakhtinian study, much of it devoted to Wiesel.

  
  

• Lawrence K. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (Yale, 1998). A collection of essays on the afterlife of the Holocaust in fiction and other arts.

  
  

• Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan, eds., Retrovision: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction (Pluto, 2001). More film than fiction; monarchy, Shakespeare, some SF.

  
  

• James Ogude, Ngugi's Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation (Pluto, 1999). Historical allegory, postcolonialism and Kenyan identity.

  
  

• Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto, 2001). The archive as a site for exploring issues of imperialism, the national past, the heritage industry, and so forth.

  
  

• Daniel Candel Bormann, The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel: A Poetics (and Two Case-Studies) (Peter Lang, 2002). Explores the competing rhetorics of science and history, with the "case studies" being Swift and Byatt.

  
  

• Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market (Ohio, 2003). Explores the Victorian culture of "family Bibles" and its significance for contemporary literature.

It's baaack...

Eek! The book MS has returned from the publisher. And I've got less than three weeks to fix everything and finalize the index (gulp).

Ah, deadlines.

More fun with referrals

Unfogged has definitely hit the ungrammatical jackpot. In recent weeks, I've had yet more people come looking for "L-st S-m-r-i Sl-sh F-ct-n" (none here, folks), as well as for "powdered margaritas" (at a teetotal blog?), "corrective behavior" (for what?), and "arc art renewal center stupid" (I guess they're not making that many friends...).

UPDATE: "old lady professors who take points off when..." When what? Inquiring minds want to know.

New low

I didn't think it was possible, but it's true--I've managed to find a nineteenth-century novel worse than William Sewell's Hawkstone (1845). Allow me to explain the magnitude of this discovery. If conservatives are liberals who have been mugged, then Sewell demonstrates that a rabid Victorian anti-Catholic is a Tractarian who has seen several co-religionists take "the road to Rome." Hawkstone, his heavy-breathing, wetly fulminating and in general sludgily grotesque attack on all things having to do with Catholics, Low Church evangelicals and trade unionists, is a fine example of the depths to which Victorian didactic prose was capable of sinking. Sewell's idea of dialogue, for example, consists of one person asking questions and the other responding in page-long spurts of Anglican theology. The plot, which rambles on for over 800 pages, manages to climax with the main villain being eaten by rats (ewww). Sewell understands neither character development nor pacing. The whole thing is a turgid triple-decker mess.

To find an even less competent didactic novel, I had to cross the Atlantic. The winner is...Julia McNair Wright's Almost a Priest. Wright, a postbellum nativist, recycles a number of standard anti-Catholic plots, most notably that of the heiress "seduced" by the Church for her money. But to call her narrative technique "plotting" would require more Christian charity than I currently possess. Instead, Wright offers the reader a loosely concatenated run of scenes, all stultified instead of animated by wooden dialogue. Instead of characterization, Wright supplies stereotypical boilerplate. Even the illustrations are incompetent. (The illustrator never mastered facial proportions; in one case, a "beautiful" young woman comes out looking like Bob Hope with heavy eyebrows.) There's literally nothing positive to be said about the book. It's a truly amazing achievement!