readers, reading, interpreting Flashcards
Eliot letter about influence and imagination
and Hardy on readers
man and woman are ‘imaginative beings. We cannot, at least those who ever read to any purpose at all… help being modified by the ideas that pass through our minds’
Hardy in a letter to Gosse: ‘One cannot choose one’s readers’
Kate Flint on Eliot’s novels
• ‘Eliot’s own novels were structured to refuse her readers the kind of satisfaction promised by the works she attacked [in lady novelists.’] Kate flint.
Indeed, In Middlemarch we are told of Dorothea’s ending ‘many who knew her, thought it was a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in certain circles as a wife and a mother’
- Anxiety that ‘a novel might lead a woman to becomes dissatisfied with her mundane domestic duties’ – Flint.
Daniel Deronda’
‘Gwendolen’s uncontrolled reading, though consisting chiefly in what are called pictures of life, had somehow not prepared her for this encounter with reality.
blurring of fiction into life.
Eliot’s idea of the web as achieving a different kind of satisfaction: that of completion and ‘knowable communities’ (Raymond Williams). Webs of interconnectedness. The promise of underlying order and completeness.
Isabel from doctors wife and her reading
absence of any “friendly finger to point a pathway in the intellectual forest”
Isabel’s excessive craving for romantic “sweetmeat”
She “want her life to be like her books
Isabel’s “idle, useless life”
Sigismund Smith
“No wise man or woman was ever the worse for reading novels. Novels are only dangerous for those poor foolish girls who read nothing else, and think that their lives are to be paraphrases of their favourite books’
after a ‘tussle with the real world’
contemporary critic on reading being sugar plums
Lady Laura Ridding opened a debate on ‘What Should Women Read? 1896
She demanded “a wholesome variety of food – well cooked, well digested, nourishing”. Ridding claims that after the “strawberry ices of literature”, the mind needs “medicine as much as a greedy child after a surfeit of sugar plums”.
maggie on Blonde’s
I’m determined to read no more books where the blond haired women carry away all the happiness”
Maggie at her climax and the crisis of interpretation.
she listens to two voices, two texts, offering conflicting interpretations of her dilemma:
Stephen Guests letter calling her ‘back to life and goodness’
and the Imitation of Christ ‘i have received the cross’. the conflict between passion and duty become interchangeable: ‘Am I to struggle and fall and repent again?’
David Carol: ‘an oscillation has taken the place of narrative progression and any kind of closure seems impossible’.
literary critic on selecting books like you select good tea lol
- Anthony Trollope, ‘On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement’
But you do not reject your daily food because there are butchers who sell unwholesome meat. There is adulterated tea in the market, but you may get your tea good if you take the trouble to look for it.
dram drinking critic
- Alfred Austin, ‘The Vice of Reading’ (1874)
‘three bad habits’, which are dram-drinking, tea-drinking, and tobacco-smoking
[BUT NOW]
reading…has become a downright vice, - a vulgar, detrimental habit, like dram-drinking;
ruskin on romance
- John Ruskin, ‘Sesame and Lilies’ (1865)
The best romance becomes dangerous if, by its excitement, it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting and increases the morbid thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which we shall never be called upon to act.
braddon wants money q
letter she says she has ‘a novle desire to attain something like excellence - and a very ennoble wish to earn plenty of money’
wilkie collins
by negotiating the amount of weekly penny journals sold weekly by publishers, Collins estimates a ‘public of three millions - a public unknown to the literary world’.
he says that they look for ‘quantity over quality’.
isabelle
“taught a smatter of everything at a day school”,
The protagonist attempts to educate herself in the “circulating libraries”
cont. crit on circulating libraries (snobbery):
G.H.Lewes the ‘debase standard’ of a circulating library. hope to ‘keep up the public tastes’.
robert audley
: “Mr Robert Audley came down to Essex for the hunting season, with half a dozen French novels, a case of cigars, and three pounds of Turkish tobacco in his portmanteau
Lady Audley’s secret where the rhetoric of toxicity is associated with the act of novel reading. rather than be a victim, he is presented as a cliche of bachelor idleness
