tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/literary-history-11751/articlesLiterary history – The Conversation2023-12-19T13:58:18Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2197392023-12-19T13:58:18Z2023-12-19T13:58:18ZHow writing ‘made us human’ – an ‘emotional history’ from ancient Iraq to the present day<p>Evidence suggests that writing was invented in southern Iraq sometime <a href="https://iris.unive.it/retrieve/e4239dde-83dd-7180-e053-3705fe0a3322/Maiocchi%20M.%202019%2c%20Writing%20in%20Early%20Mesopotamia%20--%20Beyond%20the%20Meme.pdf">before 3000BC</a>. But what happened next? Anyone interested in this question will find <a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12940/how-writing-made-us-human-3000-bce-now">How Writing Made Us Human</a> by Walter Stephens both an enjoyable and stimulating read. It offers what it calls an “emotional history” of writing, chiefly referencing academics and writers in the western tradition.</p>
<p>The most detailed sections of the book are those on the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, where the author’s expertise and wide engagement with the sources is palpable. Topics that range beyond his expertise are served by well-chosen case studies.</p>
<p>Lots of interesting things – such as <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/graffiti-and-the-literary-landscape-in-roman-pompeii-9780199684618?cc=us&lang=en&">ancient</a> and <a href="https://jisr.ut.ac.ir/article_53144.html?lang=en">modern</a> graffiti, or ancient scholars’ <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-8520">efforts</a> to reconstruct even older forms of writing – fall outside of the book’s scope. But its range, from Uruk (modern day Warka, Iraq) in the 4th millennium BC to the present day, is enormous. </p>
<p>Stephens has produced a fascinating story of twists and turns. One of the big debates which lasted up to the Renaissance was about who invented writing. With both archaeology and chronology all but unknown, what thinkers had to go on was largely the Hebrew Bible and Graeco-Roman writers. </p>
<p>Here, the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus (AD37 to AD100) looms large: Josephus offered an <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0146%3Abook%3D1%3Awhiston%20chapter%3D2">account</a> of the invention of writing before the great Biblical flood. Whether later discussants believed, disbelieved, parodied, refuted, or (due to antisemitism) deliberately ignored him, Josephus’ account turns up impressively often in studies of language across the centuries. </p>
<h2>Does writing make us human?</h2>
<p>The title, How Writing Made Us Human, is inspired by the role that learning to read and write played in the emancipation of enslaved people in 19th-century north America. Here, the American public’s acquisition of literacy skills truly promoted the advancement of humanism. It enabled enslaved people who achieved freedom to share their experiences of appalling cruelty with the reading public. The literate public were also to read the arguments for abolition, and to become advocates for it.</p>
<p>Slavery is one of the few places in the book where the effects of and attitudes to writing are discussed in relation to illiterate people. The irony is, of course, that throughout human <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674033818">history</a>, the vast majority of humans couldn’t read or write. Hopefully, nobody would describe the <a href="https://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/literacy">millions</a> of illiterate people around the world today as bad or failed humans. In this regard, the “us” in the title only works in a restricted sense.</p>
<p>On the other hand, writing has certainly played an <a href="https://www.google.it/books/edition/The_Logic_of_Writing_and_the_Organizatio/9Kn8dVDrF50C?hl=en&gbpv=0">important role</a> in shaping and structuring most human societies. In this way, it has far-reaching effects on illiterate people, too. </p>
<p>At various times writing has been a <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230339330_9">tool of resistance</a>, but also a means of <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Language-Bureaucracy-and-Social-Control/Sarangi-Slembrouck/p/book/9780582086227">social control</a>. These aspects, where writing really does impact (almost) all humans, are not much explored in the book, whose concern is historical rather than anthropological. This means that current ethnographic <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/anthropology-of-writing-9781441108852/">investigations</a> of writing and literacy likewise fall out of scope. </p>
<p>The book largely operates by collecting and analysing an imposing number of statements that scholars and literati through the ages made about writing. A complementary approach would be to work by inference, such as looking at <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/spelling-and-society/1044F189F08F6538ED52FE8A443C88CB">spelling</a> choices and traditions. And it would have been useful to see more on the practice of transmission through dictation and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666645">memorisation</a>, where writing and oral traditions merged into one.</p>
<p>Even if the book’s focus is, in principle, somewhat narrow compared with the history of writing at large, Stephens develops it in a generous way. He offers ample background information, a highly readable (and often enjoyable) tone and any number of gems – such as the Library of Constantinople reportedly including “the intestine of a dragon twenty feet long on which the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer had been written in letters of gold”.</p>
<p>As well as for the many things it has to say about attitudes to writing, the book can be enjoyed as a microcosmic study of the “western tradition”. The book demonstrates that learned attitudes to, and ideas about, writing are a fascinating vantage point from which to view that long and complicated story.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Worthington does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Evidence suggests that writing was probably invented in southern Iraq sometime before 3000BC. But what happened next?Martin Worthington, Associate Professor, Near & Middle Eastern Studies, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2015722023-07-02T20:02:03Z2023-07-02T20:02:03ZAnna Funder rescues George Orwell’s wife Eileen from being ‘cancelled by the patriarchy’ – and reminds us he’s a sexual predator<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534259/original/file-20230627-21-misl8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Untitled design</span> </figcaption></figure><p>In the summer of 2017, <a href="https://theconversation.com/powers-we-pretend-to-understand-anna-funders-all-that-i-am-7729">Anna Funder</a> found herself “at a moment of peak overload”. Juggling the competing demands of getting her children ready for the new school year, grocery shopping, home maintenance and caring for members of her extended family, Funder felt she had been spiritually drained by the monotonous demands of motherhood. </p>
<p>After stumbling across a copy of Orwell’s collected essays in a secondhand bookshop, she embarked on a project of re-reading his work, hoping his explorations of tyranny would help her liberate herself from the “motherload of wifedom I had taken on”. </p>
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<p><em>Review: Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life – Anna Funder (Hamish Hamilton)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>A few months later, disappointment struck in the form of a derogatory diary entry about his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. In it, he complains of women’s “incorrigible dirtiness & untidiness” and of a “terrible, devouring sexuality” which causes every wife to “consciously [despise] her husband for his lack of virility”. </p>
<p>The accusations about women’s sexuality are somewhat confounding when they come from a man who, as Funder reveals, was himself a sexual predator. But as she observes, they reveal that he “sees women – as wives – in terms of what they do for him, or ‘demand’ of him. Not enough cleaning; too much sex.” </p>
<p>Curious about how Orwell’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/stopping-violence-against-women-starts-with-learning-what-misogyny-really-is-175411">misogyny</a> has been interpreted, Funder consulted a series of biographies written by men, only to find it is perennially excused</p>
<blockquote>
<p>by leaving it out, sympathising with the impulse, trivialising it as a “mood”, denying it as “fiction” or blaming the woman herself. </p>
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<p>In her anger, Funder births another project, moving “from the work to the life, and the man to the wife”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534260/original/file-20230627-19-hz4ajw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534260/original/file-20230627-19-hz4ajw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534260/original/file-20230627-19-hz4ajw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=315&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534260/original/file-20230627-19-hz4ajw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=315&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534260/original/file-20230627-19-hz4ajw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=315&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534260/original/file-20230627-19-hz4ajw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534260/original/file-20230627-19-hz4ajw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534260/original/file-20230627-19-hz4ajw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Anna Funder’s book on George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, was driven by anger.</span>
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<h2>Motherhood and #MeToo</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/wifedom-9780143787112">Wifedom</a> examines Eileen’s life, interrogating the omissions and inaccuracies about her achievements and her partnership with Orwell that pepper the literary and historical records. </p>
<p>It is composed of two narrative strands: the first, set in the present, is in Funder’s voice as she investigates Eileen’s life while also navigating the pressures of motherhood and the revelations of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-the-metoo-era-a-reckoning-a-revolution-or-something-else-176565">#MeToo</a> movement. </p>
<p>The second is written in the third person and reconstructs scenes from Eileen’s life. Funder reads between the lines of Orwell’s work and the biographies of him to get the measure of Eileen’s contribution to his success. </p>
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<p>She also draws on a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/10/georgeorwell.classics">cache of letters</a> between Eileen and her best friend Norah Symes, discovered in 2005 after seven major biographies of Orwell had already been written. In her recreations, Funder quotes these letters in italics, foregrounding not only Eileen’s perspective, but also her intelligence, warmth and wit. </p>
<p>While it would be reductive to characterise this book solely as a product of the ongoing #MeToo reckoning, the movement influences Funder’s project in significant ways. As she alighted on the idea of studying Eileen, she found herself having conversations with her children about the media’s reporting of #MeToo stories and reflecting on her own experiences of sexual harassment with a new clarity – “a liberation, like the outing of ghouls”. </p>
<p>Funder also finds herself contemplating how she ended up bearing the lion’s share of work on the home front. </p>
<p>She does not blame her husband, whom she characterises as “emotionally astute” and “deeply engaged with our children”; rather, she acknowledges that while the “individual man can be the loveliest”, the “system will still benefit him without his having to lift a finger or a whip, or change the sheets”.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sharing-the-parenting-duties-could-be-key-to-marital-bliss-study-84694">Sharing the parenting duties could be key to marital bliss: study</a>
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<h2>Patriarchy: then and now</h2>
<p>Wifedom is a meditation on the insidious nature of patriarchy. Funder draws productive parallels between her own time and Eileen’s – without sacrificing the historical specificity of either. </p>
<p>Reflecting on her own life, Funder realises she </p>
<blockquote>
<p>can count on one hand with fingers to spare the number of heterosexual relationships I know in which the man creates the domestic and other conditions for the woman to enjoy her time in life to an equal extent as she does for him. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This observation captures Eileen’s fate; a talented writer with a masters degree in psychology, she becomes a taken-for-granted helpmeet when she marries Orwell. She types his manuscripts in between looking after their chickens, unblocking the toilet and preparing all their meals. She also deals with their mice infestation, as he finds the rodents too repulsive. </p>
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<span class="caption">Eileen, a talented writer, typed Orwell’s manuscripts between household chores.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Min An/Pexels</span></span>
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<p>While Orwell heavily relied on Eileen for his literary output, her labour remains invisible. Funder emphasises this point by examining the silences in Orwell’s <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781529032710/">Homage to Catalonia</a>, which she has admired since she was a teenager. </p>
<p>Eileen was also in Spain. She types the observations Orwell sends her from the front and sends him back provisions. She works at the Communist Party’s headquarters, and the information she gleans informs Orwell’s account of the war. When Orwell is shot, she travels to the front to retrieve him, nurses him and organises his medical care.</p>
<p>Orwell, however, barely acknowledges her presence in his account. He refers only a few times to “my wife” – as though she were a tourist lounging in a hotel – and consequently, it is possible to read Homage without realising she was there at all. She is, Funder observes, a negative presence in the book, “like dark matter that can only be apprehended by its effect on the visible world”. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-problem-is-that-my-success-seems-to-get-in-his-way-the-fraught-terrain-of-literary-marriages-206190">Friday essay: 'the problem is that my success seems to get in his way' – the fraught terrain of literary marriages</a>
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<h2>Orwell as predator</h2>
<p>A more disturbing aspect of Funder’s interrogation of Orwell’s personal life is her revelation of his predatory behaviour. She documents his numerous attempted rapes of female acquaintances, as well as his manipulation of Eileen throughout his infidelities. </p>
<p>In 1940, as Eileen was grieving the death of her brother, Orwell penned a letter to an old crush, a teacher named Brenda who had refused his advances on multiple previous occasions. In it, he attempts to persuade her he has Eileen’s blessing to pursue an affair – a blatant lie. </p>
<p>Funder refutes the claims of several biographers who have argued this was a “clumsy attempt to establish a ménage à trois”. She draws on Eileen’s own letters to demonstrate Eileen despised Orwell’s pursuit of Brenda and wanted no part of it. </p>
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<span class="caption">George Orwell.</span>
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<p>Funder’s reassessment of Orwell’s writing in relation to his biography reminded me of <a href="https://lithub.com/the-last-essay-i-need-to-write-about-david-foster-wallace/">a recent essay</a> by the academic Mary K. Holland, which reappraises scholarship on David Foster Wallace. Holland contends that prior to the #MeToo movement, the academy was unwilling to consider the obvious link between the misogyny and violence Wallace meted out in real life, and the “rape culture” that “so much of his fiction considers or reproduces”. </p>
<p>In Wifedom, Funder mounts a similar argument against Orwell, shedding new light on his work: though he is renowned for his examinations of power, his writing never considers power relations between the sexes. </p>
<p>Perhaps this is why, despite his commitment to documenting the lives of the impoverished and disempowered, he still felt entitled to purchase sex from a young girl in Morocco (as Funder documents), and remained ignorant of the demands he made on his wife’s time and abilities. </p>
<p>In all likelihood, Eileen recognised Orwell’s gendered blind spot, referring in one letter to his “extraordinary political simplicity”. </p>
<p>This leads to the book’s ironic denouement, in which Funder contends that patriarchy is the ultimate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink">doublethink</a>: “the whole world was set up to allow men to treat women badly, and still think of themselves as decent people”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-george-orwell-is-everywhere-but-nineteen-eighty-four-is-not-a-reliable-guide-to-contemporary-politics-190909">Friday essay: George Orwell is everywhere, but Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a reliable guide to contemporary politics</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Interrogating Orwell’s legacy</h2>
<p>Funder is clear that she doesn’t want to “cancel” Orwell – though she notes that Eileen “has been cancelled already – by the patriarchy”. </p>
<p>Rather, the value of her project lies in considering their two lives, side by side: “looking for Eileen involved the pleasure of reading Orwell on how power works, and "finding her held the possibility of revealing how it works on women: how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.”</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533469/original/file-20230622-19-i50kr5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533469/original/file-20230622-19-i50kr5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533469/original/file-20230622-19-i50kr5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533469/original/file-20230622-19-i50kr5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533469/original/file-20230622-19-i50kr5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533469/original/file-20230622-19-i50kr5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533469/original/file-20230622-19-i50kr5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533469/original/file-20230622-19-i50kr5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>This kind of reckoning is especially urgent at a time when the term “<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-does-orwellian-mean-anyway-87404">Orwellian</a>” is regularly invoked in discussions about politics. While this descriptor is often used in <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-does-orwellian-mean-anyway-87404">inaccurate</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/nov/11/reading-group-orwellian-1984">contradictory ways</a>, arguably Orwell’s stature as a political commentator has increased with the ascendancy of <a href="https://theconversation.com/yes-federal-charges-against-a-former-president-are-unprecedented-but-so-is-trumps-political-power-207408">Trump</a> and his imitators.</p>
<p>Funder is the perfect writer to integrate Orwell’s legacy. She, too, has devoted her writing life to the subject of surviving tyranny. First in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/stasiland-9780143792529">Stasiland</a>, which documented surveillance and repression in East Germany. Then, in her Miles Franklin award-winning novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/all-that-i-am-9780143567516">All That I Am</a>, which centred on the strained loyalties of a group of Nazi dissidents. </p>
<p>But Orwell placed himself in extreme situations in order to report on poverty and war. Whereas Funder is searching for a way to understand the experiences she has garnered simply by virtue of existing – as a woman, in a world designed to benefit men.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201572/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Walters does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Anna Funder’s new book, Wifedom, is a meditation on the insidious nature of patriarchy. Funder draws parallels between our #metoo era and the time of George Orwell and his wife Eileen.Amy Walters, PhD candidate, English Literature, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1998732023-03-16T04:23:26Z2023-03-16T04:23:26ZMUP has commissioned a centenary history. The result is illuminating, but in striving for ‘neutrality’ it falls short<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515402/original/file-20230315-28-ui0gow.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C9%2C1493%2C1179&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">MUP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Privately commissioned histories sit oddly within the Australian book market. Often produced as acts of institutional vanity or exercises in public relations, many are no doubt read only by members of the institutions themselves, and ignored by the wider reading public.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: MUP: A Centenary History – Stuart Kells (The Miegunyah Press)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>But for the three principal partners in their development – author, institution, publisher – they can be attractive prospects.</p>
<p>The author gets to do what they do best – research and write – and is usually paid well for their efforts. The institution gets a competently written, well-produced volume to distribute to members, clients, supporters, whomever – its shiny, glorious history enshrined in print forever. And the publisher assumes little risk, providing its publishing resources and know-how while leaving the commissioning institution to shoulder the financial burden.</p>
<p>However, as Paul Ashton and Chris Keating note in <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195515039.001.0001/acref-9780195515039">The Oxford Companion to Australian History</a>, there are dilemmas involved for historians accepting such commissions, “especially the need both to satisfy a client and to maintain professional independence.” They nevertheless conclude that “many historians continue to produce commissioned histories of the highest standards.”</p>
<p>One of Australia’s most prolific and successful historians, Geoffrey Blainey, launched his career in the 1950s with commissioned histories of the University of Melbourne and the National Bank of Australasia, among several others. Blainey “<a href="https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/the-intellectual-salad-days-of-a-professional-historian-20190620-p51zno.html">did not have the remotest desire to be an academic</a> – he wanted to be a writer of history who could make a living from his writing.” He did settle into a more conventional academic career in the 1960s, however.</p>
<p>Stuart Kells, an adjunct professor at the La Trobe University Business School and author of several well-received books on publishing and libraries, appears to be inverting Blainey’s trajectory – turning away from conventional academia in favour of privately funded work as a freelance historian.</p>
<p>In the past few years, Kells has published two commissioned histories: on <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/art-being-different">St Michael’s Grammar School</a> and <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/ashurst-hardback--1">a commercial law firm</a>. Now he has produced another: <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/mup-hardback">a centenary history of Melbourne University Press</a>.</p>
<p>This project is distinct from Kells’s previous work, in that the commissioning institution and publisher are one and the same entity. This may have made things simpler with regard to managing relationships and expectations, but more complicated in terms of maintaining authorial independence.</p>
<p>Though the book doesn’t quite resolve the latter issue, especially when it comes to MUP’s recent history, Kells, a passionate bibliophile with extensive experience in institutional archival research, has done a fine job.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-library-humanist-ideal-social-glue-and-now-tourism-hotspot-116432">Friday essay: the library – humanist ideal, social glue and now, tourism hotspot</a>
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<h2>Modest, unglamorous early years</h2>
<p>Though MUP set out to emulate the great university presses of Oxford and Cambridge, its output was modest in its first decade of operations. The word “press” in its name implied book production, but initially, MUP operated as a bookseller, a stationery store, a gown-hiring service, a post office and a telegraph department.</p>
<p>Of these unglamorous functions, “the book-room was far and away the chief activity of the press” in the 1920s, but MUP did begin to publish books in partnership with Macmillan, the British trade publishing giant. MUP’s ambition to become a publisher aligned with the 1918 declaration of the president of Columbia University:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A university has three functions to perform: It is to conserve knowledge; to advance knowledge; and to disseminate knowledge. It falls short of the full realisation of its aim unless, having provided for the conservation and advancement of knowledge, it makes provision for its dissemination as well.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>MUP published 56 titles in its first decade, but financial irregularities led to the removal of its physically and mentally unwell director, Stanley Addison, in 1931. The advertisement for his replacement was explicit: “Men Only”.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/reading-the-landscape-university-publishing-houses-and-the-national-creative-estate-103327">Reading the landscape: university publishing houses and the national creative estate</a>
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<h2>Deplorable sexism</h2>
<p>In maintaining such appallingly sexist standards of the time, MUP was overlooking an outstanding internal candidate. <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ramsden-barbara-mary-11484">Barbara Ramsden</a>, who had begun working at the press in June 1931, was not invited to apply, in what Kells describes as “an indefensible mistake and part of a deplorable pattern”.</p>
<p>Socialist poet Frank Wilmot was appointed instead, and shifted the direction of the press in two ways. At a time of intensifying nationalist sentiment in arts and culture, he championed Australian writing; he was also a more prudent financial manager.</p>
<p>But as Kells demonstrates, “Wilmot’s MUP was also Ramsden’s MUP.” Ramsden would become “the backbone of the press.” When Wilmot died suddenly in February 1942, she was effectively left in charge, but paid substantially less than Wilmot had been. When the permanent role was finally advertised in March 1943, Ramsden applied, and was unsuccessful. She found her new boss, Gwyn James, “erratic and irascible”. Yet she stayed on throughout his tenure and beyond, finally retiring from the press in 1967.</p>
<p>Kells quotes Peter Ryan, who took over from James in 1962, to capture the remarkable extent of Ramsden’s role and influence: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The wide span of her duties encompassed staff management, administration, supporting the board, managing suppliers, and “all the important and delicate decisions that attend editing, design, typesetting, proofreading, printing and distribution of works of high scholarship.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Without question, Ramsden is the unsung heroine of the history of MUP.</p>
<h2>Peter Ryan’s partial mea culpa</h2>
<p>Ryan was an ambitious and rigorous director of MUP, who brought stability and financial security to the press. An eccentric man who enforced high standards, he was also unafraid of controversy. His immodest publishing philosophy was “to publish across the whole world of scholarship, but to publish nothing but the best.” </p>
<p>Ryan inherited and, to his regret, honoured Gwyn James’s open-ended commitment to publish as many volumes of Manning Clark’s <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/a-history-of-australia-volumes-1-2-hardback">A History of Australia</a> as he chose to write. The six eventual volumes were all published during Ryan’s 26-year tenure. As their quality declined with each volume, they increasingly became the bane of Ryan’s professional life. </p>
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<span class="caption">A young Peter Ryan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Lines of Fire)/MUP</span></span>
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<p>This all become public knowledge when Ryan recounted his experiences with Clark in Quadrant magazine in September 1993. Ryan delivered a full-throated attack upon Clark, who had died in 1991. Castigating the historian for his sloppiness with facts, Ryan described publishing the series as the greatest shame of his life. Clark’s History, he wrote, “remains largely an imposition on Australian credulity – more plainly, a fraud.”</p>
<p>Ryan’s essay caused a considerable furore. In quoting many of the participants, Kells presents a balanced view of the affair. However, his failure to cite Doug Munro’s <a href="https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/history-wars">History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark Controversy</a> (2021), despite recommending it for further reading in his acknowledgements, is significant.</p>
<p>Critically, Kells leaves out Munro’s documented proof that Ryan repeatedly misrepresented the contractual relationship between Clark and MUP. Far from being tied to an open-ended commitment, which was never formalised, Ryan negotiated and signed an agreement for four volumes in 1963, and agreed to variations thereafter. He also failed to make any provision for peer review, which goes some way to explaining why so many of Clark’s errors survived the editing process. Perhaps Ryan’s acrimony was as much a reflection on his own failings as Clark’s.</p>
<h2>The Adler era and beyond</h2>
<p>The 1990s were a period of instability for MUP. The appointment of <a href="https://documents.uow.edu.au/%7E/bmartin/dissent/documents/sau/Davis.pdf">hardline neoliberal</a> Alan Gilbert as vice-chancellor of the university, along with shaky finances and several changes in leadership at the press, did not bode well for its future. A review of its operations led to the 2003 appointment of Louise Adler as chief executive officer. It had taken 80 years to appoint a female leader.</p>
<p>With a CV that includes stints at The Age, the ABC, the Victorian College of the Arts and Australian Book Review, Adler is as Melbourne arts establishment as they come. Controversy seems to follow her everywhere. Most recently, as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, she has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/feb/25/adelaide-writers-week-withdrawals-sad-and-unfortunate-director-louise-adler-says">maintained</a> a refreshingly principled stand on free expression for Palestinian writers in the face of a barrage of criticism.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
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<p>As CEO of MUP, Adler was tasked with commercialising the press. That is, improving the bottom line by commissioning more profitable titles for a general readership. Although MUP had always published non-academic books, this had been done so on the understanding that they were assessed as rigorously as scholarly publications.</p>
<p>Under Adler, these standards slipped dramatically, while the advances paid to popular authors skyrocketed. Eyebrows were raised at the parade of self-serving political memoirs, some far less worthwhile than others. She also commissioned the publication of books that simply had no place on the list of an academic publisher – most notoriously, the <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/i-mick-gatto-paperback-softback--1">autobiography</a> of Melbourne underworld figure Mick Gatto.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515409/original/file-20230315-258-7eqg1b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515409/original/file-20230315-258-7eqg1b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515409/original/file-20230315-258-7eqg1b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515409/original/file-20230315-258-7eqg1b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515409/original/file-20230315-258-7eqg1b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515409/original/file-20230315-258-7eqg1b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515409/original/file-20230315-258-7eqg1b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515409/original/file-20230315-258-7eqg1b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke (centre) with publisher Louise Adler at the launch of his biography Hawke: The Prime Minister by his wife Blanche D'Alpuget in Sydney, 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tracy Nearmy/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The whispered complaints of scholars gradually grew into a cacophony, finally leading to a university-imposed shift in direction in 2019, after which Adler and five other board members resigned. I have <a href="https://medium.com/@dominickelly_/well-there-are-other-publishing-companies-ce98faea0c2e">written elsewhere</a> about this controversy, so I won’t repeat myself here; suffice to say that the change in direction was the cause of much relief for those who value the reputation of an academic press.</p>
<p>Intriguingly, Kells did not seek comment from Adler about the 2019 imbroglio. According to a recent <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/books/brave-spaces-but-not-safe-ones-what-louise-adler-did-next-20230221-p5cma8.html">profile</a> in The Age, Adler is “annoyed and disappointed” about this. She has a point. Adler is one of the few people associated with the affair who declined to comment as it unfolded. Some reflection from such a key player, four years after the fact, would have been useful.</p>
<p>Kells instead chose to rely on evidence in archives and public commentary, which he says allowed him to maintain his neutrality. But there is no reason why an interview with Adler would have challenged this neutrality. On the contrary, his decision to not give her a right of reply brings into question his authorial independence – was there an instruction from the university or the press not to include Adler’s voice in MUP’s official “neutral” version of what happened?</p>
<p>Furthermore, Kells’s section on Adler’s replacement, Nathan Hollier, lacks objectivity. Hollier is his subject as well as his commissioning editor, and Kells heaps praise on what Hollier is doing with the press. I raise this not to disagree with Kells – for what my outsider’s perspective is worth, I think Hollier is doing an excellent job of restoring MUP’s reputation – but to question whether he is truly in a position to make an objective assessment of his own publisher.</p>
<p>All of which is to say, commissioned histories will continue to be problematic as long as they continue to be published. For all of my qualms about some of Kells’s authorial judgements, this is a worthwhile and illuminating book, and an important contribution to Australia’s literary and intellectual history.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>CORRECTION: This article originally stated that Stuart Kells has previously written four commissioned histories. Two of those were not in fact commissioned.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199873/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dominic Kelly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Privately commissioned histories are a strange literary beast. In MUP: A Centenary History, Stuart Kells does a fine job, but doesn’t quite resolve the matter of maintaining authorial independence.Dominic Kelly, Adjunct Research Fellow, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1355792020-04-06T10:29:40Z2020-04-06T10:29:40ZCoronavirus: Defoe’s account of the Great Plague of 1665 has startling parallels with today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325249/original/file-20200403-74216-125mov7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C5%2C3342%2C2345&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A street during the Great Plague in London, 1665, with a death cart and mourners.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wellcome Images</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1722, Daniel Defoe pulled off one of the great literary hoaxes of all time. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3314902/">A Journal of the Plague Year</a>, he called his latest book. The title page promises “Observations of the most remarkable occurrences” during the Great Plague of 1665, and claims it was “written by a citizen who continued all the while” in London – Defoe’s own name is nowhere to be found. </p>
<p>It was <a href="https://archives.cjr.org/second_read/the_greatest_liar_1.php">60 years before anyone twigged</a>. From oral testimonies, mortality bills, lord mayor’s proclamations, medical books and literature inspired by the 1603 plague, Defoe had cooked the whole thing up.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325255/original/file-20200403-74255-1osxope.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325255/original/file-20200403-74255-1osxope.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=717&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325255/original/file-20200403-74255-1osxope.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=717&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325255/original/file-20200403-74255-1osxope.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=717&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325255/original/file-20200403-74255-1osxope.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325255/original/file-20200403-74255-1osxope.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325255/original/file-20200403-74255-1osxope.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Unreliable memoir: Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Maritime Museum, London.</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>And yet this extraordinary book lies like the truth. It’s the most harrowing account of an epidemic ever published – and it really leaps off the page now in the era of COVID-19. We feel what it was like to walk up a main thoroughfare with no one else about. We read of the containment orders published by the government, and how people got round them. We share the distress of families denied proper funerals for their loved ones. </p>
<p>We learn of the mass panic as people tried to understand where the disease came from, how it was transmitted, how it could be avoided, what chance you had if you caught it, and – most modern of all – how fake news and fake practitioners multiplied answers to all those questions.</p>
<h2>Then and now</h2>
<p>Bubonic plague was, of course, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/London_s_Dreaded_Visitation.html?id=syAeAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">far nastier than coronavirus</a>. In its ordinary form – transmitted by fleabites – it was around 75% fatal, while in its lung-to-lung form, that figure went up to 95%. But in the way it was managed – and the effect it had on people’s emotions and behaviour – there are eerie similarities amid the differences. Defoe captured them all.</p>
<p>His narrator, identified only as HF, is fascinated by what happened after the lord mayor ordered victims to be locked in their homes. Watchmen were posted outside front doors. They could be sent on errands to fetch food or medicine and took the keys with them, so people contrived to get more keys cut. Some watchmen were bribed, assaulted or murdered. Defoe describes one who was “blown up” with gunpowder.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325257/original/file-20200403-74220-1qlz3iz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325257/original/file-20200403-74220-1qlz3iz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325257/original/file-20200403-74220-1qlz3iz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325257/original/file-20200403-74220-1qlz3iz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325257/original/file-20200403-74220-1qlz3iz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325257/original/file-20200403-74220-1qlz3iz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1345&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325257/original/file-20200403-74220-1qlz3iz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1345&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325257/original/file-20200403-74220-1qlz3iz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1345&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>HF becomes obsessed with the weekly mortality figures. They charted deaths by parish, giving a picture of how the plague was moving around the city. Still, it was impossible to be sure who had died directly of the disease, just as in the BBC news today we hear people have died “with” rather than “of” COVID-19. Reporting was difficult, partly because people were reluctant to admit there was an infection in the family. After all, they might be locked in their homes to catch the disease and die.</p>
<p>HF is appalled by those who opened up taverns and spent their days and nights drinking, mocking anyone who objected. At one point he confronts a group of rowdies and gets a torrent of abuse in return. Later, exhibiting one of his less appealing traits, he is gratified to hear that they all caught the plague and died.</p>
<p>He is a devout Christian, but the stories that worry him most are the ones that still shock everyone today, regardless of their beliefs. Is it possible, he asks, that there are some people so wicked that they deliberately infect others? He just can’t square the idea with his more kindly view of human nature. Yet he hears plenty of stories about victims breathing into the faces of passers by, or infected men randomly hugging and kissing women in the street.</p>
<h2>Discriminating disease</h2>
<p>When Prince Charles and Boris Johnson fell ill recently, we were told the virus “<a href="https://news.sky.com/video/coronavirus-virus-does-not-discriminate-gove-11964771">does not discriminate</a>”. HF has something to say about that. For all his uncertainties, he is adamant about one thing. Plague affected the poor disproportionately. They lived, as they do now, in more cramped conditions, and were more susceptible to taking bad advice. </p>
<p>They were more likely to suffer ill health in the first place, as now, and they had no means of escape. Near the start of the outbreak in 1665, the court and those with money or homes in the country <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/great-plague/">fled London in droves</a>. By the time the idea had occurred to the rest of the population, you couldn’t find a horse for love or money.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325254/original/file-20200403-74225-1jds7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/325254/original/file-20200403-74225-1jds7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325254/original/file-20200403-74225-1jds7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325254/original/file-20200403-74225-1jds7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325254/original/file-20200403-74225-1jds7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325254/original/file-20200403-74225-1jds7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/325254/original/file-20200403-74225-1jds7cn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Lord, have mercy on London.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Contemporary English woodcut on the Great Plague of 1665.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Throughout the journal, HF tells us he hopes his experiences and advice might be useful to us. There’s one thing in particular governments might learn from the book – and it’s tough. The most dangerous time, he reports, was when people thought it was safe to go out. That was when the plague <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/26/coronavirus-restrictions-when-does-it-end-and-could-there-be-a-second-wave">flared up all over again</a>.</p>
<p>Plague literature is a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/01/plague-fiction-writers-infectious-disease">genre in its own right</a>. So what draws writers and readers to such a grisly subject? Something not entirely wholesome, perhaps. For writers, it’s the chance to explore a world in which fantasy and reality have swapped places. We depend on the writer as heroic narrator, charting the horror like the best news reporter. </p>
<p>For readers, it’s the feeling that you might sneak with him to the very edge of the plague pit and live to tell the tale. For his closing words, HF hands us a doggerel poem that sums up his feelings and ours:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A dreadful plague in London was<br>
In the year sixty five,<br>
Which swept an hundred thousand souls<br>
Away: yet I alive!</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135579/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Roberts is the co-editor of the World Classics edition of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year with Louis Landa.</span></em></p>Written 60 years after the bubonic plague swept London, Defoe’s account may have been a hoax, but it still rings true today.David Roberts, Professor of English and National Teaching Fellow, Birmingham City UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/619552016-07-26T04:50:49Z2016-07-26T04:50:49ZTechnology changes how authors write, but the big impact isn’t on their style<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131839/original/image-20160725-26512-1d2wx0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C161%2C1329%2C1153&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, similar to the one Nietzsche used.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malling_Hansen,1867,_Dänemark.jpg">Peter Mitterhofer</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Our writing instruments are also working on our thoughts.” Nietzsche wrote, or more precisely <em>typed</em>, this sentence on a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, a wondrous strange contraption that looks a little like a koosh ball cast in brass and studded with typewriter keys. Depressing a key plunged a lever with the typeface downward onto the paper clutched in the underbelly. </p>
<p>It’s well-known that Nietzsche acquired the Writing Ball to compensate for his failing eyesight. Working by touch, he used it to compose terse, aphoristic phrasings exactly like that oft-quoted pronouncement. Our writing instruments, he suggested, are not just conveniences or contrivances for the expression of ideas; they actively shape the limits and expanse of what we have to say. Not only do we write differently with a fountain pen than with a crayon because they each feel different in our hands, we write (and think) different kinds of things. </p>
<p>But what can writing tools and writing machines really tell us about writing? Having just published my book <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674417076">“Track Changes”</a> on the literary history of word processing, I found such questions were much on my mind. Every interviewer <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/how-to-write-a-history-of-writing-software/489173/#article-comments">I spoke with</a> wanted to know how computers had changed literary style. Sometimes they meant style for an individual author; sometimes they seemed to want me to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/30/track-changes-a-literary-history-of-word-processing-matthew-kirschenbaum-review">pronounce upon the literary establishment</a> (whatever that is) in its entirety. </p>
<p>Style is at once something tangible – built up out of individual words and phrasings, with the academic specialization of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry">stylometry</a> devoted to its study – and elusive, associated with a writer’s “voice” or the unique “feel” of their prose. Doubtless this is why it fascinates us, and why we’re so concerned to know what computers are doing to it. And yet I think the question is misplaced.</p>
<h2>Word processing did change the game</h2>
<p>We know a lot of things about how computers changed the nature of literary writing: revision, obviously, became easier, and in fact the distinction between revision and composition began to erode entirely. (There are now <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/freewrite/481566/">dedicated writing devices</a> that force you to power through a draft without stopping to revise.) </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131832/original/image-20160725-31171-1y3le41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131832/original/image-20160725-31171-1y3le41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131832/original/image-20160725-31171-1y3le41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131832/original/image-20160725-31171-1y3le41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131832/original/image-20160725-31171-1y3le41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131832/original/image-20160725-31171-1y3le41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131832/original/image-20160725-31171-1y3le41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">WordStar, shown here running on a Kaypro IV, was the word processor of choice for a number of early adopters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Matthew Kirschenbaum</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We also know that word processors found their way into plots and settings, as typewriters had in novels like William S. Burroughs’ <a href="http://www.groveatlantic.com/#page=isbn9780802122070%20">“Naked Lunch”</a> or Stephen King’s <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Misery/Stephen-King/9781501143106">“Misery.”</a> </p>
<p>And we know that the circumstances of literary production changed: In 1983, as I detailed in my book, John Updike used his typewriter to fire off a note dismissing his secretary because he had just gotten a word processor. A year later Primo Levi wrote to an English friend that he was “<a href="https://joemoran.net/2016/05/07/primo-levi-mac-bore/">in danger of becoming a Mac bore</a>.” When she wrote back that it was merely a “clever new typewriter,” he replied: “It’s a lot more than that! It’s a memory prosthesis, an archive, an unprotesting secretary, a new game each day, as well as a designer, as you will see from the enclosed centipede picture.”</p>
<p>But none of these are really observations about style. </p>
<p>Style is the sum of many different influences – the instrument the author is writing with, to be sure, but also market trends and editorial dictates, what an author is reading that week, his or her emotional state and much else besides. (Nietzsche himself had chosen the word <em>“Gedanke”</em> in his original German – “thoughts” – not anything so particular as style.)</p>
<p>Recently, in fact, two researchers tried to determine whether literary style could be measured based on <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/mfa-creative-writing/462483/">whether or not writers had been through an MFA program</a>, another deterministic variable seemingly easy enough to isolate. They failed.</p>
<h2>Rather than style, the sense of the text</h2>
<p>Sitting at a typewriter, we are always in the present moment as the carriage trundles forward character by character, line by line. Word processing, by contrast, allowed writers to grasp a manuscript as a whole, a gestalt. The entire manuscript was instantly available via search functions. Whole passages could be moved at will, and chapters or sections reordered. The textual field became fluid and malleable, a potentially infinite expanse, or at least limited only by the computer’s ever-expanding memory. </p>
<p>The result was a new kind of control over writing space, a sentiment shared by early adopters of the technology otherwise as different from one another as National Book Award winner <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/02/arts/stanley-elkin-65-writer-of-stylish-fiction.html">Stanley Elkin</a> and queen of the vampires <a href="http://annerice.com">Anne Rice</a>. “Once you really get used to a computer and you get used to entering the information from that keyboard, things happen in your mind, I mean, you change as a writer. You’re able to do things that maybe you never would have thought of doing before,” <a href="http://www.wiredforbooks.org/annerice/">concluded Rice</a>. Elkin extolled his renewed appreciation for plot after acquiring a word processor in 1979: “Plots have become very interesting to me,” he <a href="http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-stanley-elkin-by-peter-j-bailey/">told an interviewer</a> at the time. “You put the machine into the search mode, and you find what the reference was earlier, and you can begin to use these things as tools, or nails, in putting the plot together.”</p>
<p>What Elkin and Rice are describing, each in their own way, is what composition theorists like Christina Haas have called the “<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1775762.Writing_Technology">sense of the text</a>.” It means the mental model of the words on the page (or screen) and how the writer perceives his or her relationship to them. Word processing, as the testimony of countless writers suggests, profoundly altered their sense of the text, both in terms of how they approached their writing and what they thought possible. But all of that is a far cry from “style,” typically defined as an author’s individual word choices and sentence structures or arrangements.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129077/original/image-20160702-18294-jrp58l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129077/original/image-20160702-18294-jrp58l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129077/original/image-20160702-18294-jrp58l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129077/original/image-20160702-18294-jrp58l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129077/original/image-20160702-18294-jrp58l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129077/original/image-20160702-18294-jrp58l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129077/original/image-20160702-18294-jrp58l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129077/original/image-20160702-18294-jrp58l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This illustration from an early word processing manual sought to reassure anxious authors that their prose was still there, even after it had scrolled off the edge of the screen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">PerfectWriter manual</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Running word-processed prose through a computer</h2>
<p>Which is not to say that kind of analysis couldn’t be done. In fact, specialists have been doing it for decades. You would begin by choosing a writer like Isaac Asimov, someone who wrote a lot and for whom we happen to know the exact day on which he acquired his first computer: a TRS-80 Model II on May 6, 1981. You would want a digitized corpus of his books from before and after, and then you would see what you could find with your algorithms. </p>
<p>Even then, though, the question would nag: What would those algorithms tell you? They might reveal some heretofore unimagined master key to Asimov’s oeuvre. But you might also be left with something like stylometrist Louis Milic’s contention about <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Swift">Jonathan Swift</a>, famously <a href="http://stephenramsay.us/text/2012/11/08/stanley-and-me/">demolished by literary theorist Stanley Fish</a>: “The low frequency of initial determiners, taken together with the high frequency of initial connectives, makes [Swift] a writer who likes transitions and made much of connectives.” </p>
<p>As it happens, a couple of researchers a few years back <a href="http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-author-signal-nietzsches-typewriter.html">performed exactly this exercise with Nietzsche</a>; tantalizingly, they were apparently able to distinguish between his earlier and later style, pivoting around the onset of his blindness and the acquisition of the Writing Ball. Their results were based on word frequencies, an analysis of which showed the philosopher’s writings to cluster into different groupings based on dates in which the texts were composed.</p>
<p>And yet, a table of word frequencies has nothing to do with sentence length, which was the impetus for the philosopher’s own comment in the first place. Nietzsche, after all, was remarking on the way in which the Malling-Hansen lent itself to brief bursts of text (not unlike tweets) – not the evolution of his personal vocabulary. And we also know that the Writing Ball was only one of several workarounds Nietzsche was eventually forced to adopt – he also dictated prose aloud to secretaries, for example.</p>
<p><a href="http://english.yale.edu/people/adjunct-professors-and-senior-lecturers-creative-writers/anne-fadiman">Anne Fadiman</a> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Bc9LpS6o6VwC&pg=PA93&lpg=PA93&dq=anne+fadiman+word+processing+spoor&source=bl&ots=Lqun7XhG-d&sig=63c703RwgeOD3ixCnaOg3Rzfv08&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjL_8720NfNAhXM7CYKHSuLAF0Q6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=anne%20fadiman%20word%20processing%20spoor&f=false">once claimed</a> she could detect the “spoor” of word processing in other writers’ prose. Using computers to sniff out other computers may yet tell us fascinating things about the delicate membrane between thoughts and the written word. Indeed, it may be that the best way to measure the technology’s impact on literary style is in aggregate, through big data approaches: assembling dozens or hundreds of authors’ bodies of work. It would be fascinating to know, for example, whether the dictates of the grammar checkers built into modern word processors have had a measurable impact on literary prose.</p>
<p>But we’ll still be left with all the imponderables of hands on keyboards. Writing machines may be complicated, but writing itself is always infinitely more so.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/61955/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Kirschenbaum does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The writing process is different whether your instrument is a fountain pen, a crayon, a typewriter or a computer. What fingerprints does the technology leave on the product?Matthew Kirschenbaum, Professor of English, University of MarylandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/481042015-09-28T20:27:54Z2015-09-28T20:27:54ZWriting for good in the contemporary novel of purpose<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96005/original/image-20150924-2468-1fedjq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96005/original/image-20150924-2468-1fedjq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96005/original/image-20150924-2468-1fedjq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96005/original/image-20150924-2468-1fedjq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96005/original/image-20150924-2468-1fedjq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96005/original/image-20150924-2468-1fedjq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96005/original/image-20150924-2468-1fedjq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96005/original/image-20150924-2468-1fedjq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anchor Point (2015), by Alice Robinson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In March 2015, when the days remained long and hot, so dry that the paddocks around my house were tinder, my debut novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25025392-anchor-point">Anchor Point</a> was published.</p>
<p>The events of the novel occur under pressure from exponential <a href="https://theconversation.com/cli-fi-literary-genre-rises-to-prominence-in-the-shadow-of-climate-change-25686">environmental fragility and climate change</a>.</p>
<p>As 2015 has worn on, cooling, growing bitter, as the rain failed to arrive, I’ve been invited to speak and write on the idea that “writing for good” – writing to enact positive social change – is a valid and important thing for fiction writers to do. A session at the upcoming <a href="http://www.youngwritersfestival.org/">National Young Writers’ Festival</a> speaks to this topic.</p>
<p>I am deeply touched by the inherent optimism in this notion: that writers and artists who direct their work toward the prevailing issues of the time can somehow alter the real world, for the better.</p>
<h2>The lineage of writing for good</h2>
<p>Literature is constructive as well as reflective, and there is certain power in this.</p>
<p>Historian and literary critic David Masson, in <a href="https://archive.org/details/britishnovelists00mass">British Novelists and Their Styles</a> (1859), observed the development of novels written out of “contemporary earnest”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have to report, as characteristic of British novel-writing recently and at present, a great development of the Novel of Purpose.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This trend, of course, was not limited to Britain, but it certainly grew in strength across the nineteenth century.</p>
<p>Literary scholar Amanda Claybaugh, in her book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3243030-the-novel-of-purpose">The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World</a> (2007), finds that such nineteenth-century novels sometimes related to social reform movements and sometimes did not. Yet all took their “conception of purposefulness” from the desire to change society.</p>
<p>Fiction can underwrite understandings of what is deemed desirable and appropriate by a given culture; what is unacceptable, what is feared and abhorred. Novels rising from moments of conflict and hardship sharpen focus on the inequalities and struggles of those times.</p>
<p>In doing so, such narratives raise awareness of key social issues and potentially move the culture toward empathy, understanding, change – or else underscore unfortunate cultural resistance, the failure of those things to eventuate.</p>
<h2>A literary history</h2>
<p>Many examples of this phenomenon already exist in literature across the world.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11486.The_Color_Purple">The Colour Purple</a> (1982), Alice Walker’s gruelling novel of gender inequality and racism in 1930s Georgia, was published in the early 1980s. It simultaneously showcases conditions for black women before the civil rights movement and draws attention, by comparison, to the shortcomings of contemporary race and gender relations in the movement’s wake.</p>
<p>More recently, Dave Eggars’ novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2208185.What_Is_the_What">What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng</a> (2006) lays bare the heartbreaking difficulties and deep resilience of the refugee experience. It portrays the life of one Sudanese “Lost Boy” fleeing his nation’s civil war for the United States.</p>
<p>In an entirely different kind of book, John Marsden addresses the refugee experience. His poignant and distressing illustrated work for children, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6483418-home-and-away">Home and Away</a> (2008), sits within the Australian context.</p>
<p>These texts exert complex cultural pressure around contemporary issues, inviting the reader to inhabit the terrible, but authentic, experiences they portray.</p>
<p>Such books write into the heart of historical and current difficulties with intrinsic hopefulness, spotlighting dark times so that they can be seen clearly for what they are.</p>
<p>In contrast, <a href="https://theconversation.com/science-fiction-and-dystopia-whats-the-connection-8586">dystopian novels</a> such as George Orwell’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5470.1984?from_search=true&search_version=service">1984</a> (1949), Robert C. O’Brien’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/69477.Z_for_Zachariah">Z for Zachariah</a> (1974), Margaret Atwood’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38447.The_Handmaid_s_Tale">The Handmaid’s Tale</a> (1985), P.D. James’ <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41913.The_Children_of_Men">The Children of Men</a> (1992) and Meg Rosoff’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161426.How_I_Live_Now">How I Live Now</a> (2004), to name a few of my favourites, wrestle with the future.</p>
<h2>Literary possibilities</h2>
<p>Offering visions of frightening social, political and environmental breakdown, such novels convey the fear that our legacy will be danger and unrest, the future a terrifying context where humanities’ core qualities – capacity for kindness, compassion, cooperation – will be tested, even altogether razed.</p>
<p>So often these speculative narratives arise from periods of perceived genuine threat to our real-world way of life: <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-life-more-terrible-the-women-of-12-years-a-slave-21936">slavery</a>; industrialization; the spectre of <a href="https://theconversation.com/hiroshimas-literary-legacy-the-blinding-flash-that-changed-the-world-forever-45471">nuclear obliteration</a>; the <a href="https://theconversation.com/holding-the-man-and-bringing-hiv-aids-in-australia-to-a-mainstream-audience-43250">AIDs epidemic</a>; the digital revolution. By portraying perilous imagined futures, dystopian narratives help illuminate the cultural anxieties of the present day.</p>
<p>This is also true of the climate change novels currently surfacing in Australia and globally. According to UCLA Journalism and Media Fellow <a href="http://rebeccatuhusdubrow.net/">Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow</a>, in her article <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dissent/v060/60.3.tuhus-dubrow.pdf">Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre</a> (2013), the threat of climate change has become:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>too pressing [for authors] to ignore, and less abstract, thanks to a nonstop succession of mega-storms and record-shattering temperatures.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some novels, like Margaret Atwood’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46756.Oryx_and_Crake">Oryx and Crake</a> (2003), Cormac McCarthy’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6288.The_Road">The Road</a> (2006), Jane Rawson’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17832116-wrong-turn-at-the-office-of-unmade-lists">A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists</a> (2013) and James Bradley’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23307015-clade">Clade</a> (2015) imagine grim social, political and humanitarian crises that could arise in response to profound degradation of the natural world.</p>
<p>Others, like my own, are set in the early stages of environmental and systemic breakdown, when there remains a narrow possibility for turning things around.</p>
<p>Either way, just as the threat of nuclear war felt imminent in the 1950s, making way for the anxious cultural sense that bombs could drop at any moment, climate change is also imminent – and this is reflected in the stories we are telling. </p>
<p>But unlike the threat of life in a radioactive world, the impacts of climate change are now actual, and inevitable. While science can tell us what climate change is likely to look like in various <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-africa-is-particularly-vulnerable-to-climate-change-41775">regions</a> from an <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-change-could-empty-wildlife-from-australias-rainforests-41023">ecological perspective</a>, we just <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-scariest-part-of-climate-change-isnt-what-we-know-but-what-we-dont-45419">don’t know</a> for sure what our lives will be like as significant change comes to pass.</p>
<h2>Writing for the future</h2>
<p>A work of fiction is a guess, a possible response to a question we have no other way of answering.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://theconversation.com/bushfires-are-burning-bright-in-australian-letters-and-life-36141">another hot summer</a> looms, as I contemplate my little children who stand to inherit the issues we are now failing to adequately address, as I turn in disgust from the governmental inertia around climate change in Australia, it feels clearer now than ever before that fiction writing alone cannot alter the collision course with disaster we seem determined to create.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96013/original/image-20150924-17100-1blrasx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96013/original/image-20150924-17100-1blrasx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96013/original/image-20150924-17100-1blrasx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96013/original/image-20150924-17100-1blrasx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96013/original/image-20150924-17100-1blrasx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96013/original/image-20150924-17100-1blrasx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96013/original/image-20150924-17100-1blrasx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96013/original/image-20150924-17100-1blrasx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A firefighter battles an out-of-control bushfire in Western Australia in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">DFES WA/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Whatever optimism there may be inherent in the ability of writing to enact meaningful change in the world, it seems both a heavy duty to bestow to individual practitioners, and too little too late.</p>
<p>When I think of writing for good in the context of <a href="https://theconversation.com/cli-fi-could-a-literary-genre-help-save-the-planet-23478">writing about climate change</a>, I see that there is power in fiction’s capacity to illuminate unknown futures for those living now, to show what life might be like in climatically altered circumstances, how they could be survived. I see that there is good, also, in recording our cultural despair in fiction as a message to those in the future.</p>
<p>We once imagined the perils of your experience, and we are sorry.</p>
<p><em>The National Young Writers’ Festival takes place in Newcastle, October 1-4. Details <a href="http://www.youngwritersfestival.org/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48104/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alice Robinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In a world full of catastrophe, what good are books? Specifically, can books be written to do good?Alice Robinson, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Melbourne PolytechnicLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/400442015-04-23T09:58:25Z2015-04-23T09:58:25ZThou art translated! How Shakespeare went viral<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78984/original/image-20150422-1885-1v6kz7s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A 1964 Soviet stamp depicts William Shakespeare.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-51135505/stock-photo-russia-circa-stamp-printed-by-russia-shows-portrait-shakespeare-circa.html?src=csl_recent_image-1">"Stamp" via www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Peter Quince sees Bottom turned into an ass-headed figure, he cries in horror: “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated!” </p>
<p>Other characters in the play use the verb in similar ways to refer to a broad range of altered states. Helena hopes to be “translated” into Hermia, her childhood friend and rival, while a love potion transforms characters that come in contact with it. </p>
<p>Appropriately enough, translation has come to define Shakespeare’s legacy. Since the 16th century, his plays and sonnets have been translated and performed all over the world in an ever-growing number of languages, dialects and styles. One of the most translated secular authors in the world, more than four billion copies of his works have been sold.</p>
<p>Why did Shakespeare – and not his contemporaries like Christopher Marlowe or Thomas Kyd – “go viral?” </p>
<p>A closer look reveals that his narratives contain qualities that are easily adaptable to different cultures and eras, and have given his works broad appeal outside his native England. It helps explain why, even before mass communication, Shakespeare was a hit with readers ranging from Soviet communists, to German Romanticists like Goethe.</p>
<h2>Plays depict a brave new world</h2>
<p>Shakespeare’s global popularity is paralleled by the diverse settings of his plays. </p>
<p>As English audiences were becoming more attuned to the world beyond their own, Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies and romances were often set in locales outside of England, Scotland and Wales – places like Athens, Elsinore (Denmark), Illyria, Troy, Cyprus, Cairo, Tunis, Bohemia, Verona and Venice. And many of his characters hail from various parts of the world, whether it’s The Merchant of Venice’s Prince of Morocco or the Indian pageboy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.</p>
<p>While Shakespeare’s plays were initially performed in England and Europe, by the end of the playwright’s life they’d been transported to corners of the globe that would have seemed remote from the perspective of a 17th-century Englishman. In 1619, for example, Hamlet was performed in colonial Indonesia.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78983/original/image-20150422-1907-b67naf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78983/original/image-20150422-1907-b67naf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78983/original/image-20150422-1907-b67naf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78983/original/image-20150422-1907-b67naf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78983/original/image-20150422-1907-b67naf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78983/original/image-20150422-1907-b67naf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78983/original/image-20150422-1907-b67naf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78983/original/image-20150422-1907-b67naf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Shakespeare translated into Odia, a language spoken in India.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nauright/5287024052/in/photolist-94co47-rHLdCm-688NpQ-arTTLh-nSRAPy-46uZse-gJuMsj-8PybHq-4HiKJE-64qbTH-onLhdx-8iVbfE-5XgjuA-6D8yQr-3QC6s3-fTDmB2-4NBjrz-bGQ5W-qkHV1-paTgTs-6thXSP-bUYTaW-8eJ1tx-6tn6WW-6Vsaot-eqaBkt-adpM3Z-6TfzmX-6TeXKc-kDBNrX-z8Jg3-5QnRnU-6Zs4mc-a5eJd-2NiV3-dQfTY1-8gpifr">ramona klee/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Translations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works began emerging in the 18th century. With time, to have a Shakespearean play translated into a country’s native language became an honor. When his translation of Hamlet was published in 1877, Portugal’s King Luis I was widely <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/1860_1929_In_memoriam.html?id=RD_vcQAACAAJ">praised</a> for “giving to the Portuguese Nation their first translation of Shakespeare.”</p>
<p>Today, several editions of Shakespeare exist in hundreds of languages. And a number of the translators are prominent figures in the world of letters in and beyond their own cultures: August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Paul Celan (Germany), Voltaire (France), Tsubouchi Shōyō (Japan), Rabindranath Tagore (India) and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria).</p>
<h2>Cultural appropriation</h2>
<p>Literary translation can modernize the original text, making it culturally relevant to a specific time and place. </p>
<p>For this reason, Shakespeare in translation can appear as a contemporary of the German Romantics, a spokesperson for the proletarian heroes of the Soviet Union or required reading for communists.</p>
<p>New titles given to Shakespeare’s plays are suggestive of the preoccupations of the society that produced them. The 1710 German adaptation of Hamlet is titled <em>Der besträfte Brudermord</em> (The Condemned Fratricide), which suggests Germany’s interest in the legalistic and thriller aspects of the tragedy, rather than the prince’s moral dilemma. Meanwhile, Sulayman Al-Bassam’s 2004 Arabic adaption is called The Al-Hamlet Summit, which comments on terrorism and contemporary politics in the Middle East. </p>
<p>The elasticity of Shakespeare’s narratives allow them to act as a vehicle for discussion of taboo or difficult subjects, which vary depending on the audience they’re geared towards. </p>
<p>For example, Western directors, translators and critics of The Merchant of Venice tend to zero in on the character Shylock, the ethics of conversion and the play’s religious tension. </p>
<p>But in East Asia, the play wears a completely different mask: Portia is its central character, the female emancipation movement its main concern. Meanwhile, Asia’s nascent capitalism looms. Again, the titles reflect a shifting focus. In China, it’s commonly called A Pound of Flesh, while a 1885 Japanese adaptation was dubbed The Season of Cherry Blossoms, the World of Money. Meanwhile, a 1927 Chinese silent film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice was titled The Woman Lawyer.</p>
<h2>Eternal evolution</h2>
<p>Over the past century, stage, film and television adaptations of Shakespeare have emerged in every corner of the globe. Audiences, in turn, have become both an outsider and insider – exposed to shifting styles and interpretations, but familiar with certain aspects of Shakespeare.</p>
<p>Shakespearean motifs and characters are found in popular shows like Star Trek, while stage productions utilize a wide range of styles (for example, physical theater companies like <a href="http://www.synetictheater.org/">Synetic Theater</a>) and languages (such as <a href="http://www.kli.org/stuff/Hamlet.html">Klingon</a>!). </p>
<p>Even in Britain, homegrown and touring companies have staged Shakespearean performances that may seem foreign to the sensibilities and linguistic repertoire of local audiences. Acclaimed directors such as Claus Peymann (Germany), Robert Lepage (Quebec) and Peter Sellars (US) have presented Shakespeare in styles borrowed from international theatrical traditions. They have also used multi-national casts, some of whom will speak in foreign languages on stage. </p>
<p>In 2014, the Royal Shakespeare Company <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/19/translating-shakespeare-in-china/">announced</a> a $2.4 million initiative to commission a new Mandarin translation of the Complete Works, setting an unprecedented example of a major translation of Shakespeare supported by British funds and led by a major British organization. The new translation will be part of a “global folio” of Shakespeare translations timed for the 400th anniversary of the First Folio.</p>
<p>Clearly, Shakespeare’s popularity and global appeal is only growing. And like any virus that adapts and changes to its host environment, the works of Shakespeare will continue to evolve into 21st century.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40044/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexa Huang receives funding from the US-UK Fulbright Commission to research global Shakespeare</span></em></p>Centuries before the internet, Shakespeare became a global phenomenon.Alexa Huang, English professor, George Washington UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/348352014-12-10T11:03:39Z2014-12-10T11:03:39ZGuardians of the Galaxy and the fall of the classic hero<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66766/original/image-20141209-32146-1bwxkmf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Guardians of the Galaxy -- whose protagonists are a morally-gray motley crew -- could be seen as a satire of the classic hero tradition.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/121483302@N02/14693264267/in/photolist-oooPyx-oXME3w-pUp8XH-oXRiiX-pUHqy3-pVxTyi-7AahTt-pDu41K-oZ7NvP-pVRasc-pDvVXW-pDu4vT-pDqxZ6-pVZhyC-oDoaRy-nBUxCV-odzzFx-q9f3Ru-oTgejw-oL3qy2-efSGS9-oyssWj-nMgLYs-gT4rL1-kfUQa1-oT2UqL-h554sz-oqYjMj-pW672Y-oGA791-ouNtXi-odzBCi-oYfZz7-ait619-oBBPve-oFkWK9-ooXXzq-k8zJvr-k8CbuL-of3aiT-pDvTXU-gmB8R4-898aaT-phEo5L-pDqz1K-oA66cD-ftz7ax-oJbKLD-dm8ex2-feNKEv">BagoGames/Flickr </a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A beautiful assassin. A superstrong thug. A star-lost child of the ‘80s. A sentient tree. A gun-toting raccoon. Meet the morally gray protagonists of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the film that raked in $770 million at the box office this past summer and was just released on DVD. </p>
<p>Guardians, I’d like you to meet 20th-century mythology theorist Joseph Campbell. Trust me, you’ll have a lot to talk about.</p>
<p>…Oh, what’s that? You already know Mr. Campbell? Ah, that’s right, I’d forgotten: you beat the <em>stuffing</em> out of his heroic monomyth in your movie this year.</p>
<p>For those unfamiliar with the term: Campbell’s monomyth, also known as the “Hero’s Quest” or “Hero’s Journey,” is a narrative pattern derived from his extensive analysis of myths and stories from all around the world. In his 1949 book <a href="http://www.jcf.org/new/index.php?categoryid=83&p9999_action=details&p9999_wid=692">The Hero with a Thousand Faces</a>, Campbell outlines the pattern that nearly every “heroic” protagonist, going all the way back to ancient times, follows.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, the protagonist is placed outside of his or her comfort zone, and, after toiling through various obstacles and setbacks, emerges to beat the bad guys and change the world for the better. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66767/original/image-20141209-32159-1egk7es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66767/original/image-20141209-32159-1egk7es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66767/original/image-20141209-32159-1egk7es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66767/original/image-20141209-32159-1egk7es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66767/original/image-20141209-32159-1egk7es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66767/original/image-20141209-32159-1egk7es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66767/original/image-20141209-32159-1egk7es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mythologist Joseph Campbell noticed a pattern in the character arc of hero protagonists.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Campbell_(cropped).png">Joan Halifax/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOVFvcNfvE">trailer</a> of its newest installment was released last week, think of the original Star Wars as an example. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSyyqctan2c">George Lucas had Campbell in mind</a> when he created Luke Skywalker, farmboy turned rebel hero. Lucas even paid attention to the finer points of Campbell’s model, giving Luke a teacher (Obi-Wan), helpers (Han Solo, the droids), a magic talisman or weapon (the light-saber), and, most importantly, a moment that Campbell calls “the Abyss.”</p>
<p>It’s this Abyss – also known as “The Belly of the Whale” – that’s the low point in the monomythic cycle and vital to understanding what’s so notable about Guardians of the Galaxy. In the original Star Wars, Luke Skywalker experiences – all things considered – an “easy” low point: he’s sucked underwater in the Death Star trash compactor. In The Empire Strikes Back, things get a bit thornier: he gets his whole hand chopped off (<a href="http://io9.com/if-the-rumors-are-true-star-wars-episode-vii-is-weird-1608208842">rumored to be a plot point</a> in <a href="http://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-episode-7-droid-hand/">JJ Abrams’s The Force Awakens</a>) and plummets from Cloud City. Basically, if a hero doesn’t face an actual death, he or she has to (at least) deal with a metaphorical death before returning as a stronger, savvier version of himself.</p>
<p>But where was the Abyss moment in Guardians of the Galaxy? Was it when young Peter Quill loses his mother and is taken by aliens? Or, wait – maybe it’s when he’s thrown into that space prison and escapes? There’s also that moment when his team is nearly killed by an explosion in the Collector’s establishment. And Quill is all-but-dead when he leaves the safety of his ship to freeze and suffocate in exposed space while selflessly saving his teammate Gamora. And who can forget the scene when he is practically torn apart by wielding the Infinity Stone?</p>
<p>It’s as if Quill and his Guardians are running in loops around Campbell’s monomyth. Or, even better, the movie-makers are flagrantly disregarding it. They’re nearly satirizing it.</p>
<p>If audiences step back a bit, it’s easier to see how Guardians of the Galaxy might be a satire of the classic hero tradition. Villains are constantly interrupted mid-maniacal monologue, elaborate plans are impulsively overturned, and Quill, the movie’s closest thing to a hero, challenges the film’s protagonist to a dance-off. (Of course, there’s also the fact that two of the main characters are a tree and a raccoon!)</p>
<p>This is not to write off Guardians of the Galaxy and claim it’s a goof on Campbell’s model. Instead, it could be seen as a reaction to just how predictable, how tired, and even how broken the monomyth is today. The Guardians, remember, are just as much rogues as they are good guys. As Quill asks his team of misfits, “What should we do next: Something good, something bad? Bit of both?”</p>
<p>What Guardians of the Galaxy will do next – presumably in their Summer 2016 sequel – is continue to challenge our modern notions of heroism. Campbell’s monomyth was proposed just after World War II, at the dawn of the Cold War. It was a time when, in popular culture, the distinctions between heroes and villains were far more explicit. </p>
<p>Today, Quill and company are being presented to movie-going audiences at a time when when we’re distancing ourselves from old models – when we sorely crave a new pattern. The pure hero, the “white hat” of the old Westerns, is largely lost to us. Brilliant actors like Robin Williams and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are done in by their own personal ghosts, musicians like Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston succumb to their addictions, and politicians – like the <a href="http://www.myfoxchicago.com/story/20803102/4-of-illinois-last-7-governors-went-to-prison">four Illinois governors who have been sent to prison</a> – continue to disappoint. The Dark Knight perhaps said it best: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” </p>
<p>The monomyth is making its final orbit. Heroes are so yesterday. Welcome, instead, to the tomorrow of the Guardians: characters who are a little good, a little bad, and more unpredictable than ever.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34835/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>A. David Lewis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A beautiful assassin. A superstrong thug. A star-lost child of the ‘80s. A sentient tree. A gun-toting raccoon. Meet the morally gray protagonists of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, the film that raked…A. David Lewis, Arts & Sciences Faculty Associate, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/349082014-12-08T10:59:58Z2014-12-08T10:59:58ZThe strange fates of the Shakespeare First Folio<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66444/original/image-20141205-8661-2tft2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The recent discovery of a First Folio in St. Omer, France brings the total number of known copies to 233.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Folio_VA.jpg">Victoria and Albert Museum, London, National Art Library</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Shakespeare First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his plays and the sole source for half of them (including Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, All’s Well, As You Like It, and The Tempest), is one of the most valuable books in the world: Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/theater/2014/12/02/shakespeare-expert-authenticates-folio/19768727/">recently paid US$6 million for a copy</a>. </p>
<p>The unexpected discovery of a Shakespeare First Folio in the public library of a northern French town has raised questions about how many were originally printed (estimated to be 750), how many still exist (now 233), and how often such books come to light. If recent history is any guide, the answer to the last question appears to be once every six years.</p>
<p>In 2002, Lilian Frances Cottle of Tottenham, North London died intestate and a tattered copy of the First Folio was found among her effects. In 2008, an unemployed, self-described ‘fantasist’ named Raymond Scott walked into Washington, D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library with a copy that he claimed to have acquired from one of Fidel Castro’s bodyguards. The First Folio in question turned out to have been stolen from Durham University, and the flamboyant Scott – who arrived at his trial in a horse-drawn carriage, dressed in all white, holding a cigar in one hand and a cup of instant noodles in the other, while reciting lines from Shakespeare’s Richard III – was <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1299635/Conman-Raymond-Scott-tried-sell-stolen-Shakespeare-manuscript-2m.html">convicted of the theft and imprisoned</a>). </p>
<p>And in the most recent discovery, exactly six years later, Remy Cordonnier, a librarian in St. Omer, France, identified a mis-catalogued collection of Shakespeare’s plays as an original First Folio. The book had been housed in the library of the Jesuit College of St. Omer for centuries before being inherited by the town’s public library. But because it was lacking the title-page and had no identifying title on the binding, it had long been assumed that it was a relatively worthless reprint, until Cordonnier took an interest in the volume and called me in to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/arts/shakespeare-folio-discovered-in-france-.html?_r=0">authenticate it</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66446/original/image-20141205-8664-k70rl7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66446/original/image-20141205-8664-k70rl7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=698&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66446/original/image-20141205-8664-k70rl7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=698&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66446/original/image-20141205-8664-k70rl7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=698&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66446/original/image-20141205-8664-k70rl7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=877&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66446/original/image-20141205-8664-k70rl7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=877&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66446/original/image-20141205-8664-k70rl7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=877&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">British critic Sidney Lee was knighted for locating and documenting the existence of 152 copies of the Shakespeare First Folio.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sidney_Lee_002.jpg">The Critic: An Illustrated Monthly Review of Literature, Art and Life</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For more than a century, considerable effort has gone into determining how many copies of this rare book still exist. In 1902, the British scholar Sidney Lee published a book – <a href="https://archive.org/details/shakespearescome00leesuoft">Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: A Census of Extant Copies</a> – that rightly claimed to be the “first systematic endeavour to ascertain the number and whereabouts of extant original copies of the Shakespeare First Folio.” Lee located 152 copies and was later knighted for his efforts. </p>
<p>The tireless legwork of British folio-hunter Anthony James West in the 1990s led to the discovery of 80 more copies. In our 2012 census, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Shakespeare-First-Folios-Descriptive/dp/023051765X">The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue</a>, West and I gave an extensive account of the 232 copies known at that time, relying whenever possible on firsthand inspections by ourselves or our research associates. </p>
<p>Curiously, though, several copies recorded by Lee have disappeared since 1902. During the Great Depression, a copy was <a href="http://www.markrondeau.com/folio.html">filched from Williams College</a> by a New York shoe salesman (who ultimately returned it in a drunken stupor because he was worried that it might fall into the hands of Adolf Hitler). Another copy stolen from Manchester University in 1972 has never been recovered.</p>
<p>Although the theft of institutional copies is generally well publicized, a few privately owned First Folios have quietly vanished. Despite two decades of searching, our research team could find no trace of the copy that had belonged to Major-General Frederick Edward Sotheby of Northamptonshire (which had been in the Sotheby family since 1700). The title-page from the copy owned by Ross R. Winans, Esq., of Baltimore somehow found its way into the First Folio now at Carnegie Mellon University, but the Ross folio itself has vanished. </p>
<p>The copy owned by Lord Zouche of Parham was sent to the British Museum for safekeeping in 1900, and the librarian <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-First-Folio-History-Census/dp/0198187688/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1417826447&sr=1-2&keywords=anthony+james+west+shakespeare+folio">confirmed to Sidney Lee</a> that Zouche’s “folio Shakespeare is here with his books of which we are taking care.” They did not, it seems, keep a watchful eye over it: the copy has since gone missing.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66449/original/image-20141205-8636-1ar5cnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/66449/original/image-20141205-8636-1ar5cnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66449/original/image-20141205-8636-1ar5cnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66449/original/image-20141205-8636-1ar5cnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=871&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66449/original/image-20141205-8636-1ar5cnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1094&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66449/original/image-20141205-8636-1ar5cnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1094&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/66449/original/image-20141205-8636-1ar5cnj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1094&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Novelist Thomas Hardy’s neighbor apparently possessed a First Folio. ‘Mr de Lafontaine, my neighbour in Dorset,’ he wrote to Sidney Lee, ‘is the fortunate possessor of a 1st Folio Shakespeare, which he would like to show you.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomashardy_restored.jpg">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And six years after Lee published his census, the novelist Thomas Hardy <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=gpQRb1LMqmYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=rasmussen+shakespeare+thefts&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nSeCVIX7CcPqoAS1_IHIAg&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=hardy&f=false">wrote to inform Lee</a> that “Mr [Alfred Cart] de Lafontaine, my neighbour in Dorset, is the fortunate possessor of a 1st Folio Shakespeare, which he would like to show you. Your opinion upon it will be highly valued by him, & of great interest to me.”</p>
<p>In 1899, the same Alfred Cart de Lafontaine had <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Shakespeare-Thefts-Search-Folios/dp/0230341675">given a talk</a> about the recent restoration of his manor to the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club. His audience, gathered “under the shade of a fine cedar,” heard Lafontaine detail the work he had done to the house and gardens; he described the long gallery or library, and singled out its two most precious items: “a pair of boots worn by King Charles I when a boy” and “also a very fine folio Shakespeare.” </p>
<p>Despite these written records, Lafontaine’s copy has never been traced.</p>
<p>So while the discovery of the St. Omer copy has added to the number of known copies, one can only regret that at least a half-dozen have somehow slipped through our fingers.</p>
<p>Then again, there’s always the chance that six years from now, one of them will turn up.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34908/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eric Rasmussen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Shakespeare First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his plays and the sole source for half of them (including Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, All’s Well, As You Like It, and The Tempest…Eric Rasmussen, English Department Foundation Professor and Chair, University of Nevada, RenoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/298462014-08-06T03:33:30Z2014-08-06T03:33:30ZHistorical Kiev, a city ringing with ‘holy, heavenly songs’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/55828/original/9xsv74hr-1407291705.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev is a sign of the city's former historical significance.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">matt shalvatis</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>A city glistening with the light of holy icons,<br>
fragrant with incense,<br>
ringing with praise and holy, heavenly songs.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>These lines referring to the “mother of Russian cities” and the “joy of the world” may not bring to mind the present capital of Ukraine, the place where the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs along with her Dutch counterpart urged international control of the MH17 crash site. </p>
<p>They are the oft-quoted words of its bishop, <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/265683/Hilarion-Of-Kiev">Ilarion of Kiev</a>, uttered at a time before St Petersburg was founded (1703) and even before the rise of Moscow, a city of no great significance until the 12th century. </p>
<p>The Kiev of ancient Rus was one of a number of fortified cities dotting the great plains that were watered by rivers debauching into the Black Sea or the Mediterranean. Kievan Rus’s links with Western Europe were then relatively strong, even though Rus had converted to Greek Orthodoxy in preference to any other main religion. </p>
<p>As recounted by the <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/513866/The-Russian-Primary-Chronicle">Russian Primary Chronicle</a>, Roman Catholicism was rejected because it insisted on the sovereignty of the Pope; Judaism because the walls of Jersualem had fallen down - not a good example; and Islam because alcohol was forbidden. Drinking was “the joy of the Russians”. </p>
<p>But the emissaries who came back from Constantinople had discovered places of worship so beautiful they “knew not whether [they] were in heaven or earth”. </p>
<p>With this recommendation, how could Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kiev, in 988 AD (according to tradition) refrain from being baptised, or from ordering his people to do likewise? How could his peers fail to demonstrate the love, joy and fellowship that flowed from the practice of Christian virtues, as in the case of the prince David:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>David came to Rurik for dinner, and they were in great love and extreme joy. Rurik presented him with many gifts and saw him off. After that his nephew Rostislav Rurikovich invited him to dinner in Belgorod. David went to Belgorod and there they dwelled in great joy and love; Rostislav presented him with many gifts and saw him off. David also invited for dinner the great prince Rurik, his brother and his sons, and they dwelled in joy and great love, and David presented to his brother Rurik many gifts and let him go. </p>
<p>Then David invited all the monks for dinner and was joyful with them, and distributed rich alms to them and to the poor and let them go. And then David invited all the Black Hoods (a Turkish tribe); and all the Black Hoods drank with him; he bestowed many gifts upon them and let them go. The citizens of Kiev began to invite David for feasts affording him great honour and many gifts; and David invited the citzens for dinner and dwelled with them in extreme joy and great love and let them go. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Such feasts were supported by the richly fertile black earth, which could be sown over and over again without a fallow year, and by the forests full of honey and wild animals. Claimed one boastful hunter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At Chernigov I bound wild hares with my bare hands and captured 10 or 20 live horses with the lasso. and besides that, a stag once gored me, one elk stamped on me while another gored me, a boar tore tore my sword from my thigh, a bear on one occasion bit my kneecap, and another wild beast jumped on my flank and threw my horse with me. But God preserved me unharmed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A deep significance was attached to the forests that harboured bees, berries, mushrooms, insects and rodents, all of which took their place in lore and literature. Folk arts - embroidery, wood carving, singing - thrived, even in the harsher times to come. </p>
<p>By the beginning of the 12th century Rus had divided into 12 independent principalities all fighting for power, all trying to get ascendancy over Kiev. The city was sacked and pillaged so often it began to decline, a process which was completed by the invasion of the Golden Horde, the Mongols.</p>
<p>On their first coming they cut through the tribes like “a knife through butter”, accepting the Grand Prince’s truce then betraying him, and departing quickly, leaving the chronicler to remark, “Only God knows whence they came and whither they went”.</p>
<p>13 years later they returned, spearheaded by Gengis Khan. Installing a Mongol overlord and a Russian second-in-command, but leaving the people alone so long as they did what they were told, the Mongols reigned over Rus from about 1240 to 1480, isolating her from all contact with the culture and political development of Renaissance Europe. </p>
<p>The isolation of Kievan Russia under the Mongols was deeply formative, and did not lack significance for the future of Ukraine. But it was the Muscovites who finally routed the Mongols and wrote the next chapter in the story of Russia’s relationship with the West. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/29846/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Judith Armstrong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A city glistening with the light of holy icons, fragrant with incense, ringing with praise and holy, heavenly songs. These lines referring to the “mother of Russian cities” and the “joy of the world” may…Judith Armstrong, Honorary Associate Professor in Arts and Languages & Linguistics, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.