Reach out

A family friend forwarded Matthew Wright's essay on budget cuts and English in the UK to me, with its thesis about literary critics needing to "connect in new ways with the audience for intelligent and informed literary criticism" &c.   Of course, from Wright's point of view, I'm one of the benighted sort who write about "'discovered' writers whose work would be of little interest to a broader readership."  Which amused me no end, because my impressionistic sense of my readership is that most of my non-academic and/or non-specialist readers come precisely for all those apparently unreadable Victorian religious novelists.  It's very difficult to predict what the "broader readership" actually wants.  It may be Dickens, but then again, it may also be Emma Leslie.  (One might need to define "broader readership" first.) 

Comments

[Mr Punch]

Well, sure, this is the "log tail."

It's actually a historic strength of British scholarship, given new value by modern communications - but some people, still captive to mid-20th-century concepts of mass culture, don't seem to get it.

[Deb]

I enjoy reading your blog (although I don't comment very often) precisely because of many of the "obscure" writers and books that you have read and written about. There are plenty of blogs out there for people who want to read and re-read Austen and Dickens and Hardy and James--and I'm not in any way denigrating them, but there's only one place to I can think of where I can read about, say, Truth without Fiction, and Religion without Disguise.