How far we have come from the days when novel reading was A VICE up there with drinking tea and Ye Heinous Sinne of Onan.
It’s official! According to science, reading fiction makes you nicer. Dodell-Feder and Tamir noted that the nature of the link between fiction and social awareness is still not fully clear; they recommended that future research ( Read more... )

(Dare one wish Emily A Happy Birthday?)
This piece, about Was Charlotte Right to Burn The (quite possibly chimerical) Manuscript of Emily's Second Novel: Emily Brontë’s Lost Second Novel is based on some pretty 'ahem' readings of Wuthering Heights: Emily, being the homebody she was, was also fascinated by ancestral homes, dwellings where several ( Read more... )

An Oral History of the Lesbian Avengers - fascinating. Though with this: I also think the internal fucking fucked the Lesbian Avengers. When you start getting into relationships and you’re happier, you protest less because you’re less outraged.
I was rolling my eyes somewhat and thinking, sounds more like a whole lot of intra-organisation ( Read more... )

I see this actually dates back some years, but my flabber is still ghasted: It's Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That's Not About Love: "Literary girls don't take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men."
('Literary girls': shudder.)
Ummm: over a long and misspent life - misspent, I may add, reading ALOT, we have ( Read more... )

Well, at least Richard Dawkins didn't think Metamorphosis was actually a work on entomology? - or maybe he did, and somebody said, 'No, Richard, it's fiction' and he was trying to work out how that worked? I picture him as one of those children in Victorian stories taught on the Grandgrindian method, or coming further up to date, along the lines ( Read more... )

I thought this was going to be awful: Bookforum contributors on the risky books they’d like to read now (because is this a moment for risky books?) but some of them are not bad at all: My favorite books have a headlong quality, a sense that the author was having fun, saying “fuck it” at some point in the process and letting go of the idea of ( Read more... )

'Why are there no women great artists?' - okay, we know, do we not, my dearios, that there are great women artists? - but there might be more. One of the reasons why there are not as many as there might be could be that they felt they had Other Priorities (not necessarily Being A Muse). I was already apprised of the not necessarily softer side of ( Read more... )

I was actually rather irked by this piece on British lesbian fascists, because a) I think there's a huge lacuna there, which is not talking about the (probably relevant) class origins or aspiration of the women along that trajectory b) 'many suffragettes became fascists'? (plz to be giving cites) c) I can think of several well-known lesbians ( Read more... )

I have, of late, my dearios, deplored the rise of the Reading Is Good For You (rather than a fun activity) You Should Be Doing It To Improve Yourself discourse -
- but I see we still have people who have not yet got that memo, and are absolutely appalled that their daughter is reading and reading a lot (as a fast reader, I know and cringe at that ( Read more... )

So maybe a spot of personal stock-taking and introspection -
It feels really, really weird but I don't have any active academic thing on my to-do list at the moment?
I had a proposal which was probably a tad peripheral to the stated focus of the edited volume politely turned down last month.
I submitted the draft (at least) of my essay for edited ( Read more... )