I love a 'did not do the reading' codslap
Have we been getting Jane Austen wrong for all these years?: Kelly does not seem to have read any of the many Austen scholars and critics who would have shown her that some of her discoveries are not quite unprecedented. She might also have had some salutary encounters with those who have a different case to put.
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Kelly is powerfully struck by the political content of Austen’s novels, as if she were the very first to stumble on it.
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Kelly’s eagerness to find a politically critical subtext leads her to ignore the narrative logic of the fiction.
[A] crass and dangerously inaccurate account This sweeping generalisation about a nation of 66 to 70 million people has no basis in fact.
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Ohler’s skill as a novelist makes his book far more readable than these scholarly investigations, but it’s at the expense of truth and accuracy, and that’s too high a price to pay in such a historically sensitive area.
I have my own somewhat crabby opinions about any new biography of James Miranda Barry that is greeted as a startling revelation, and one observes that possibly they are managing to take bits of the story a little further than June Rose did in 1977, but they're not only proceeding from data she uncovered, I hope they also express their gratitude somewhere for her donating her research materials to the Royal Army Medical Corps Muniments.
And in totally unrelated news, apparently nutria (coypu) is the new food sensation in Moscow. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2529865.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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