The Little Professor

Friends, Romanticists, Victorianists, lend me your...book reviews?

As of the Spring 2019 issue, I will be Book Review Editor at the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.  (My name will appear on the masthead shortly, but I'm already at work.) My time at Modern Philology all those years ago is now paying unexpected dividends! Fortunately, blue pencils, red pens, and proofs lost in the mail are no longer an issue.  

Peerless

Via Facebook, this essay by Mieke Bal advocating against the current system of peer review.  In the essay's numerical spirit, some thoughts:

1) Are "only the less active and less brilliant scholars" really the ones primarily involved in peer review? This seems an overstatement (and, perhaps, rather inadvertently insulting...).  Ironically, there are reasons that you might not want active and brilliant senior scholar X peer to referee a paper, for the same reasons that, as I discovered when working at Mod Phil, you might not want them to review a book--the activity meant nothing on their CVs and was valued accordingly.  For someone more junior, peer review is proof of both reputation and professional service.  In any event, see my initial caveat.

2) I'm not sure who ought to be having the "quality discussions" (the editors? the editorial boards? acquisition editors? publisher's review board?), although I agree that "duration" is an issue.  

3) On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to the argument that requests to cite X can be burdensome, irrelevant, or even reactionary.  (On more than one occasion, I have had to write a footnote that, in effect, serves to announce "Here is X.  X has no relation to the argument.  Nevertheless, X is here.")  On the other hand, I have seen so many articles that would not exist if the author had shown signs of reading X--because X had already written that article (or book)--that my sympathy boomerangs in the opposite direction.  In fact, there have been times when I wanted to be told to do more reading, because I knew there had to be something out there I was missing but couldn't find.  Over the years, I've developed a rule for myself that if I suggest more reading, it's incumbent on me to explain how the reading will help develop the argument.

4) There appear to be multiple levels of "know" here.  There is "know" as in "I will send this to my buddy to referee," and then there is "know" as in "help, it's an article about religious fiction, I haven't the slightest clue who Frederick Robinson is, let's send it to MB because we know she writes about this stuff."  Further, there's "we've sent articles to MB to referee before, let's keep her in mind for later work."  Most of the time, I've been approached to referee solely on the grounds that I've written something that was vaguely in the immediate near ballpark of the topic, not because the editor had ever spent time in my company.  One edited collection in which I appear did, we were told, run into the "turf policing" issue, so I'm aware of the problem--but I'm not sure there's a good solution (even just reducing things to an editor and editorial board won't eliminate the risk of an author inadvertently stepping on somebody's sprained toe, figuratively speaking).

5) I suppose you could up-end the "hierarchy" somewhat by leaving the authors anonymous and forcing the referees to sign their names, but there again you would have a different set of problems (not least because like doesn't necessarily referee like--what if a more junior referee fears retribution if they write a negative report about a senior scholar's work?).  However, here I began to wonder if our academic contexts are different enough that there are unwitting conflicts at stake in how we respectively understand the peer review process...

6) How do we define "adequate"? I have sudden visions of all the scholars working on religious fiction (all...ten of us or so?) being stuck refereeing each other, in a vicious circle.  The JBS article I published last year had extremely helpful referees, but it was clear that the editor had had to assemble multiple people from different walks of life to deal with the manuscript, and some people had never heard of the periodical at the center of my argument.  Even a reviewer who isn't up on the finer points of mid-Victorian Scottish anti-Catholic periodicals, though, can still assess whether or not the article makes logical sense, identify where the author appears to be confused, or catch holes where something has clearly been under-researched.

7)  No argument that peer review is slow.  The only way to fix that, quite frankly, is for editors to keep a close eye on their timelines, pull back articles from referees who don't get the job done, and then expedite another review--keeping the author in the loop along the way.* 

8) This problem--graduate students needing to publish for in-house reasons during the three or four years allotted for doctoral work--does not seem applicable to the United States (not least because the timeline is considerably different).  Most graduate students publish one or two articles prior to finishing the dissertation and going on the market, but that's a different can of worms; slow peer review is much more anxiety-provoking when it comes to tenure, especially when some prestigious university presses have been known to take up to a year to offer a contract (or remember the manuscript's existence, even).

9) And this makes even less sense in the United States, where humanities refereeing is double-blind.  It's difficult to wage scholarly vendettas against other scholars (let alone their students) if you haven't the slightest idea whom you're reviewing.  I suppose it's more possible with books, which may be refereed single-blind, and of course it's always possible to figure out by internal clues, as Bal points out, who the reviewer or reviewee is; I (correctly) identified the Ashgate referee for my first book, for example.  But this isn't a universal problem with peer review.

10) Bal appears to mean by "authoritative mentality" something akin to a herd mentality, which goes back to her critique of peer review's "conservative" pressures in #3.  But surely eliminating the peer reviewers and, say, keeping everything in-house (all decisions made by an editor and editorial board) doesn't eliminate this problem along with it? Publishing still implies that somebody is going to make a judgment call somewhere, and the editorial board is no less suspect to the temptations of ego &c. than random referees, even if more easily discoverable.  

*--Which reminds me that I need to write the final paragraph of a book review that was due on the 1st.  Whoops!

 

 

Time allotted

Even if you read quickly, there's only so much time. 

One of the reasons I tend to squirm when "interdisciplinarity" comes up--even though my work has been described as interdisciplinary, and even though I've sometimes felt the need to describe myself that way--is that after about twenty years of academic work (oh dear...), I've become more and more skeptical about it as a meaningful way of indicating what I do.  This Twitter thread certainly gives some ideas about how interdisciplinarity can be approached, and yet...well.  Take, for example, the ongoing confusion about what I do for a living.  Quite a few academics over the years have decided that I'm a historian, and historians often relate better to my work than some literary scholars do (that was especially the case with Book Two).  However, when I submitted the article about anti-Catholicism and statistics that eventually wound up in the Journal of British Studies, one of the (surprisingly many) referees shrewdly noted that I must be a "Studies" person, not a historian.  "Finally, someone noticed," I said, wryly.  I'm a literary historian who spends much of her academic study time reading scholarship on the history of religions, mission history, and (yes) literature and religion; this does not mean that I think like a historian or that I've mastered all of the scholarship in those fields outside my own (although I do my best to keep up with what's considered central), let alone that my methods amount to practicing history in the same way.  When I was in graduate school, this distinction was hammered home for me by listening to a historian who was working on a radical poet: his grasp of the poet's biography, his multiple contexts, and the production and circulation of his works was at a level of rich detail that not even the most historicist of us could match (or would be expected to), but he was clearly struggling to interpret how the poems worked (which is the angle all of us immediately took).  My mind still automatically goes to the text's workings (and relations with other texts) first, its historical moment second.    Literary historian who has read a lot of scholarship in other disciplines ! = interdisciplinary scholar, I think. 

Brief note: A Christian with Two Wives

The Christian Socialist clergyman and satirist James Dennis Hird got into some hot water over A Christian with Two Wives (1896), a novel (for some definition of "novel") that understandably failed to impress the Church of England hierarchy.  Hird's novel mostly falls into the relatively capacious category of late-Victorian "faith and doubt" fiction: its viewpoint character, Wentworth Manley ("manly," get it?) is a disaffected Anglican clergyman who has fallen into the business because he inherited his father's living, even though on taking up his duties, "his sensations resembled those of a man who should become conscious that he was in a coffin" (17).  While by no means an intellectual, Manley understands the basic currents of German biblical scholarship, and does not believe in Biblical inspiration (of any sort), the miracles, etc., etc., etc.  To make matters worse, he is surrounded by odious Christian hypocrites, ranging from his half-sister (whom the novel diagnoses as suffering from a bad case of sexual frustration) to the sanctimonious Mr. Skipworth (who turns out to be sexually harassing his servants).  Life, in other words, is bad.  But it's even worse for young Mary Skinner, who is ostracized after her lover impregnates her.  There is an alternative, however, in the form of Mr. George Bretton and his two wives, Raven and Lily, whom he purchased in a Cairo slave market and converted to Christianity.  As the initials may hint to the reader, Raven and Lily are stand-ins for Rachel and Leah; if you fail to notice this on your own, the novel cheerfully points it out to you.  Bretton's life with Raven, Lily, their six children (another Rachel/Leah parallel), and various cast-off women whom they have rescued is a Christian Socialist utopia, a veritable Eden within the otherwise fallen landscape of industrial Britain (the gorgeous garden should be a clue).   

In fact, Bretton is quite clear that he is a devout, if heterodox, believer, someone who insists that "the Bible is the guide of life in all things" (79).  What he isn't, of course, is an Establishment Christian.  Bretton's back-to-the-Bible position is, also of course, isomorphic with standard-issue Victorian Evangelical discourse, which fuels much of the novel's polemical energy.  (He's all about the sola scriptura, although somewhat hand-wavily so.) Once we get into the second half of the novel, in which Manley and Bretton chat, Hird turns the format of the controversial novel to heterodox ends: the two men exchange prooftexts, Bretton argues that a literal reading of the Bible supports a pro-polygamy interpretation, and Manley's objections are all overturned with miraculous ease.  In particular, Bretton insists that it is important for Christians to reinstate a non-allegorical reading of the Song of Songs as a key aspect of faith: by celebrating the Bible's endorsement of "the ecstatic embrace of two young lovers" (123), Bretton claims, Christians can liberate themselves from their oppressive attitudes to sexuality (female sexuality in particular).  Thus, Mary, whose name also seems to be pertinent, is no sinner in this line of argument, but someone who has been horribly treated by the powers that be; by novel's end, she has accepted Bretton's offer of help.  Meanwhile, Manley's religious doubts are alleviated by his conversation with Bretton, and--now converted to Bretton's brand of belief--he takes off at the end to Cairo.

Beyond the novel's "Song of Songs, yay!" approach to things, there are a couple more things of interest.  One is the novel's association of Christian Socialism with benevolent patriarchy.  For all that Bretton and his little society live what appear to be an egalitarian lifestyle, the endeavor is Bretton's project, the wives start out as literally Bretton's property, and Bretton's voice is the only one we really get to hear.  Bretton educates his wives into Christianity, and in turn his wives appear to submit wholeheartedly to his wishes.  By the same token, much of what evil befalls the other characters derives from behavior inspired by "bad" patriarchs, like Skipworth.  The second has to do with Bretton's engagement with the Middle East.  Bretton explicitly parallels the Cairo slave market, the Bristol slave trade, and the British marriage market--"our modern method of selling them secretly to any leprous old lecher" (69)--and this rhetorical slippage enables him to cast himself as both a non-hypocrite and a liberator.   Moreover, as a member of the "chosen race" (68) (whether ironically or not), Bretton understands his purchase of the two girls as a civilizing act: he teaches them to semi-assimilate (even though, in Britain, they cannot socialize with anyone outside their utopian space) and to interpret their lives through the lens of the Old Testament.  At one point, Bretton tells Manley, Raven and Lily suggested that he ought to father more children with "two lovely Nubians" (115-16)--another link to the Song of Songs, but one that here raises some unanswered questions about Hird's understanding of Christian Socialist masculinity.  On the one hand, his wives propose it (nobody owns anyone's body); on the other, his wives themselves apparently have no other sexual outlets (in fact, even a "fallen woman" like Mary is monogamously in love); on a third, Hird seems to have a vague "universal brotherhood through eroticism" notion going on, but with no attention to any actual power dynamics on the ground. 

British Library (Day II)

A couple of Catholic children’s books today, before I nipped off to have coffee with my cousin (we have an English branch on my father’s side).  Tomorrow is the last day before I begin officially conferencing.  

J. J. Kelly, With Lance and Shield: A Romance of the East (Washbourne, 1895).  A boy’s adventure book set during the Crusades.  An awesome Spanish knight who is the exemplar of chivalry (etc.) wants to marry Berengaria, niece of Conrad of Montferrat.  Alas, Conrad is kind of a jerk, and so the knight keeps winning Berengaria’s hand, then losing it, then winning it, etc.  Then Conrad is assassinated, which solves the knight’s problem.  Meanwhile, there are various undertakings against Saladin.  Less overtly religious than most of the novels put out by Washbourne, but the reader is invited to contemplate the workings of Providence.

Edward Cox, The Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary! Tales for the Young (Washbourne, 1889).  Various short stories centering on the importance of prayer and/or the rosary, including a dream vision and a couple of historical tales set during the Reformation and Elizabethan periods.  

British Library (Day I)

I’m on the other side of the pond for a few days, attending the Victorian Popular Fiction Association conference.  Before the conference begins, though, I’m getting in a couple of days at the British Library, reading some novels of the usual aesthetic quality.  Most of the books I want to look at have actually been digitized at this point, which makes life easier.  However:

Robert Torrens, Coelibia Choosing a Husband: A Modern Novel, 2 vols.  (D. N. Shury for J. F. Hughes, 1809).  One of the multiple unauthorized sequels to Hannah More’s Coelebs.  This is a critique of More’s novel: the heroine forms her ideal of masculine behavior by reading an (overlong) inset narrative told by Mary, an overly sensible (as in “sense and sensibility” sensible, not rational) woman who commits adultery with Awesome Guy Henry.  After a happy adulterous life with Henry, Mary discovers that everything falls apart once her transgressions have been revealed, and after many disasters (including sexual assault, prostitution, attempted theft) she is reunited with Henry, only to believe that he has been executed.  Mary commits suicide.  Coelibia, though, thinks Henry the Adulterer is still an Awesome Guy, and goes through a sort of Goldilocks and the Three Bears approach to courtship: she turns down the Poet (too sentimental) and the Peer (too rigid) before falling for the Artist (just right!), who is just like Henry.  That’s because he is Henry.  They get to live happily ever after.  Torrens gets in some cracks at the dangers of extreme religiosity, which he believes leads to skepticism.  There are also some interestingly Wollstonecraftian overtones to the novel, including calls for complete egalitarianism in marriage and for the necessity of avoiding prudishness in women’s education (in effect, Torrens recommends botany for learning the facts of life).  

Mary Herbert, Baroness of Lea, Edith: A Tale of the Present Day (Richard Bentley, 1881).  A Catholic novel.  In Generation I, beautiful Madeline commits adultery (the day’s unintentional theme, I guess) and abandons her children.  The children in question, including Edith, grow up to have a conflicted relationship with their father, whom they blame for their mother’s disappearance (even after they realize what she did).  In Generation II, Edith falls in love with Sir Edward Baker (Not Good) but winds up married to Lord St. Aubyn (Good but Boring, and also a Nervous Wreck).  Nevertheless, Sir Edward keeps pursuing her, even though he is married to an ugly heiress.  Edith, however, manages to resist temptation, thanks in part to the assistance of saintly Dr. Murray, who is (gasp) a Catholic priest.  After her husband’s death, Edith spends more time thinking seriously about religion, but gets no help from either the evangelical parson (too much Bible-thumping) or the Ritualist (too dishonest).  Catholicism suits the bill, though.  After her conversion, Edith is alienated from her son, and once he marries, she decides to become a Sister of Charity.  Not surprisingly, she eventually runs into her mother, now Dying in Agony in a State of Squalor but Repentant.  At the end, Edith is off to serve with the foreign mission in China.  Sir Edward, meanwhile, dies in a hunting accident.

Sherlock Holmes (2013)

Last year, a student mentioned in passing that there had been a recent Russian adaptation of Sherlock Holmes--not the famous Soviet-era Livanov version, but one much newer, starring Igor Petrenko (Holmes), Andrey Panin (Watson), and Mikhail Boyarskiy (Lestrade).  The series appears to have a small but dedicated fanbase.   (The Calvert Journal has an overview of the longstanding Russian enthusiasm for things Holmesian.)  I'd been on the lookout for new films or TV episodes for the Sherlock Holmes and adaptation course I teach occasionally, and was wondering if there was anything I could swap in for my current Hound trifecta of Rathbone/Livanov/Cumberbatch. After some poking about, I found a fan-subbed version of all eight episodes on YouTube.   

This adaptation neatly sidesteps the usual complaints about "fidelity" by beginning from the proposition that the stories rarely had much to do with the actual cases--indeed, that the "real" Holmes is almost nothing like his narrative version.  Of course, this conceit is not new, and originates in Doyle's own stories (given Holmes' grumbling about Watson getting "romance" all over his "logic").  Such metafictional reflections have cropped up on film in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, in novels like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, Holmes Entangled, and A Slight Trick of the Mind, on occasion in Sherlock, and so on. Two things, however, are new here.  First is just how much Watson reworks "reality": the first episode, for example, is a very loose "The Adventure of Black Peter," the second a wildly rewritten The Sign of Four (without its outcome or much of anything else), and the last one is a kind of exploded "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," with the plans, the motives, and the explanations all changed.  In between, we have barely-recognizable takes on "The Musgrave Ritual" (mind-boggling in its inflation to something positively Hammer Horror-esque), "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League," "The Final Problem," etc., etc., etc., often combined within the same episode.  Second, though, is that the series' central character is arguably Watson, not Holmes. (I seem to be in agreement [PDF] here with Sherlockian Howard Ostrom, who notes that "the Watson figure is stronger than that of Holmes" [6]; while he's much more enthusiastic than I am about how the series turned out, he makes a number of interesting points about its troubled reception history in Russia and how its politics were understood there.)  The real arc of this Sherlock Holmes is Watson's emotional, moral, and professional development, from a PTSD-stricken ex-army officer to  bestselling short-story author, an arc that also draws on some of Arthur Conan Doyle's biography in terms of how Watson feels about his ultimate success.  

As there will be spoilers below, I'll put the rest below the fold.

Officious

Faculty everywhere sighed in exasperation at the suggestion in the recent Chronicle that perhaps we don't need offices.  There is nothing very avant garde about having faculty share offices--I don't think that my father had his own office until he became department chair--but many of the set-ups that I saw in the CoHE article (wide-open "lounge" spaces, etc.) seem rife for potential unhappiness.  Certainly, at one point in its past, my own department had an office in this building--

--prior to its current, prettily-restored state.  (It's now owned by the alumni association.)  As a Victorianist, I admit that I think having an office in a Victorian house would be kind of neat, but my now-emeritus colleagues were all pretty insistent that co-existing in mostly shared spaces did not necessarily make for what you'd call a fully collegial experience.  Adjuncts have been pointing out for decades now that no office space = considerable frustration, inconvenience, and sometimes downright humiliation, including no place to prepare for classes or meet privately with students.  (I know that it used to be The Thing to meet students in casual public areas [and did it myself during my year as a lecturer], but experience--not to mention more stringent regulations about maintaining student privacy--has led me to conclude that it's frequently not at all a good idea.) 

And then there was this excuse, which predictably caused me to look Very Stern: "'The other thing people would always say was, "I have to have all these journals and books." Now all this stuff is digital.'"   Here is one wall of my office:

There are two more full bookcases and an additional four shelves, in case you're wondering.

Just about everything on these shelves falls into one of three categories: not available in digital form; available somewhere in the universe, but not to me; or available and priced completely out of my range.  Electronic academic books are not cheap! So not cheap! The very opposite of being cheap! Our university has access to many e-books but no access to many others! There's a reason that nearly every monograph I purchase is secondhand! (I may have just used up my monthly allotment of exclamation points.)  If you're in the humanities, then yes, you still need bookshelves, and books to put on the bookshelves, and therefore offices in which to put the books which are on the bookshelves.  

Chapter and verse

I don't quite understand the prejudice against book chapters either--I've published twelve of them myself and have just agreed to write another one.  However, I'm also a cautionary tale, as book chapters do come with an unfortunate side of extra risk: the book not coming into being.    My first article written at my institution of residence, on Grace Aguilar, nearly got deep-sixed when the original publisher tore up the contract ("it's a great collection, but we don't want to publish anything more about the Victorians right now"); fortunately, another publisher picked up the collection relatively quickly, but not before I had to make some awkward explanations in my annual report.  Some years later, I wrote an article about The Madness of King George and its successors for a collection that didn't have a publisher.  And, after a couple of years of trying, it never found one.  Fortunately, I was able to find a hospitable film studies journal to take the article.  I'm now in the same boat with yet another book chapter, originally finished five years ago, which was destined for a volume of conference proceedings that would up (you guessed it) not proceeding; the article is currently out and about, but this one may wind up mothballed, to be honest.  

The usual problem with journals is a) time to acceptance and b) time to publication.  It is not, however, usually c) the journal's total disappearance.  Journals do cease to exist, but that's a rather less likely problem than an edited collection failing to find a publisher.  If you're a junior scholar and tenure depends in part (or whole) on your scholarly output, then it's probably a good idea to be cautious with book chapters not because of the prestige issue, but because of the "I've spent a year on this and yet there's no sign of a contract" issue.  Even when there is a contract, as my first tale of woe suggests, the publisher may elect to run it through the nearest woodchipper.  At the very least, as my record suggests, it's in your best interests to avoid edited collections unless the editor states upfront that there's a contract already in hand.  

 

Under the Pendulum Sun

Jeannette Ng's Under the Pendulum Sun is a neo-Victorian fantasy that shatters its many intertexts into brilliant, cutting little fragments.   The reader who recognizes the allusions knows what must be coming--and yet does not.    The two works holding the novel's plot together, as it were, are Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Percy Bysshe Shelley's Laon and Cythna (later rewritten as The Revolt of Islam), but the novel intercuts them with Bronte biography, Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte's Shirley, and then reconfigures them all again within a hidden narrative--indeed, an alternative Genesis--drawn from Talmudic lore.  As the novel's protagonists seek to translate Enochian, "the divine tongue" (loc. 785), so too the reader attempts to decode the novel's many layers of literary and theological allusion.  

The novel takes place in an alternate timeline, in which humans have long had contact with Arcadia, or the Faelands, occupied by strange creatures whose spiritual status (indeed, their very possession of a soul) remains unclear.  While the British pride themselves on their profitable trade relations with the fae, carried out under the aegis of the South Sea Company, they have not actually been allowed much farther than the coast and outlying towns; this is a space that resists imperial conquest.  Nineteenth-century British missionaries, however, yearn for a different sort of conquest: as one missionary declares, now that "Arcadia’s vast unknown, which has been for many ages closed against us and the Divine Word, is at last made clear and knowable," it only makes sense that the British responsible "should have the honour of being the first to carry in the balm of the blessed Gospel" (loc. 20).  In this echo of familiar imperial rhetoric, the "unknown" has become not so much "known" but, for the first time, "knowable"--a space that can be investigated, studied, and, above all, healed by the Word.  Laon (of Laon and Cythna) Helstone (of Shirley) is one of the pioneering Christian missionaries to Arcadia, but at the time the novel opens, he has gone almost completely silent; his sister Catherine/Cathy (of Wuthering Heights, but also Cythna and Jane), increasingly frightened by his silence, voyages to find him.  

As I will be giving away some major plot points, let's continue below the fold.