Bibliography
Feb. 21st, 2010 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyOrdinary Women/Mujeres Comunes: An Anthology of Poetry by New York Women – Miles et al.
This was mentioned as being worth reading in Stealing The Language by Alicia Ostriker (which I read a lot longer ago than I thought I had), along with plenty of other interesting women poets, and I thought that as I am now living in New York City, it would be appropriate to read something located in this time and place. The volume was published in 1978 and makes a very deliberate decision to include women of multiple ethnicities as writers; seventeen women are included, each with four to six poems.
Because of the obviously fragmented nature of the collection, I've been reading it in shreds over the last couple of months, so it's quite hard to do anything like pull together 'overall themes' - but then again, in some ways, that isn't the point. There are no themes for this collection, except that these were all good women writers living in New York in 1978. The category 'woman' does not mean that all other interests are the same. This means you get an intensely rich and varied collection of authorial voices, concerns, styles. One woman gives beautiful captured moments of Chinatown; another tells memories of living in Surinam; another describes her crime-ridden neighbourhood, another her small apartment and the movements within it. Some talk about love, some hate, some family. They all have different worries and perspectives, and some of them are better than others, and each reader is going to have their own opinion about what writing in this collection rings most true for them, because that's part of what poetry is. This is poetry, moreoever, that has yet to give in to the recent modern tendency for formalism; this is poetry that feels it means something, that wants to get an emotional response, leading to some beautifully crafted jewels of poems that are a joy to read.
I suspect this is not easily accessible if you don't have a research library to hand - but if you do, then I thoroughly recommend taking the time just to get hold of this volume and giving it the brief time it deserves. You will be very thoroughly rewarded, even if not in the way I was.
Andre and Oscar: The Literary Friendship of André Gide and Oscar Wilde - Jonathan Fryer
This is a thoroughly journalistic book in style, and that style makes it a very light and entertaining read. The concept is fairly straightforward - it traces the parallel biographies of André Gide and Oscar Wilde, their early lives, when they first met, how they continued to meet, the influences they had upon each other. Wilde was apparently hugely influential for Gide's thinking, and when Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was considered by some to be an apology to Wilde for his condemnation. Of course, the central thread running through the book is homosexuality and society's attitude to it; Wilde deliberately flaunted convention and was punished by the British justice system, Gide was somewhat more circumspect in his activities but eventually came out as equally if not more flamboyant in his literary work (and later his personal life).
So, why is this interesting to me? Well, in the first place I have been doing a bit of Wilde exploration, and while I didn't know much about Gide, I know of him, so this seemed like quite a nice way of continuing the background-filling-out for this particular period. I'm not sure I'm quite in the mood for reading Gide at the moment, but that is neither here or there. The value of doing the parallel lives treatment for an Englishman and a Frenchman in this period, besides being applaudably Plutarchian, is that it highlights the European dimension of literate society in this period - something I hadn't really grasped in previous Wildean escapades. The sense of interaction of the Parisian and London sets, not to mention the English aristocracy's habit of spending large amounts of time in Paris and the nicer parts of Italy, and what one might call the international gay circuit, are all rather well depicted, and you get a sense of interlocking worlds that was entirely new to me.
There are problems, of course. As it is written as a popular book, references to source material are nonexistent, as a rule, and there is a certain amount of paraphrasing and journalistic speech that makes me go 'and I would like to see the primary source that makes you say this, please' - but such are the perils of academia. Apparently Gide's memoirs are quite fruity, not to mention Wilde's own papers. As Fryer quite happily acknowledges, pretty much everything is also inconsistent, as both Wilde and Gide (not to mention Lord Alfred Douglas, swine that he was) were accomplished and extensive myth-creators. They fashioned images very craftily, and were willing to shift away from reality in order to keep their respective personae intact. But while those kinds of source questions are acknowledged, and indeed quite carefully discussed, other kinds of source questions arise from the very style the book is written in. The problem is that the self-same style makes it eminently readable and very entertaining.
I am guessing that this would set the teeth of any scholarly expert thoroughly on edge. However, for the average reader, it's a good read, providing it is approached with the knowledge that Fryer deliberately dramatises to entertain.
This was mentioned as being worth reading in Stealing The Language by Alicia Ostriker (which I read a lot longer ago than I thought I had), along with plenty of other interesting women poets, and I thought that as I am now living in New York City, it would be appropriate to read something located in this time and place. The volume was published in 1978 and makes a very deliberate decision to include women of multiple ethnicities as writers; seventeen women are included, each with four to six poems.
Because of the obviously fragmented nature of the collection, I've been reading it in shreds over the last couple of months, so it's quite hard to do anything like pull together 'overall themes' - but then again, in some ways, that isn't the point. There are no themes for this collection, except that these were all good women writers living in New York in 1978. The category 'woman' does not mean that all other interests are the same. This means you get an intensely rich and varied collection of authorial voices, concerns, styles. One woman gives beautiful captured moments of Chinatown; another tells memories of living in Surinam; another describes her crime-ridden neighbourhood, another her small apartment and the movements within it. Some talk about love, some hate, some family. They all have different worries and perspectives, and some of them are better than others, and each reader is going to have their own opinion about what writing in this collection rings most true for them, because that's part of what poetry is. This is poetry, moreoever, that has yet to give in to the recent modern tendency for formalism; this is poetry that feels it means something, that wants to get an emotional response, leading to some beautifully crafted jewels of poems that are a joy to read.
I suspect this is not easily accessible if you don't have a research library to hand - but if you do, then I thoroughly recommend taking the time just to get hold of this volume and giving it the brief time it deserves. You will be very thoroughly rewarded, even if not in the way I was.
Andre and Oscar: The Literary Friendship of André Gide and Oscar Wilde - Jonathan Fryer
This is a thoroughly journalistic book in style, and that style makes it a very light and entertaining read. The concept is fairly straightforward - it traces the parallel biographies of André Gide and Oscar Wilde, their early lives, when they first met, how they continued to meet, the influences they had upon each other. Wilde was apparently hugely influential for Gide's thinking, and when Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was considered by some to be an apology to Wilde for his condemnation. Of course, the central thread running through the book is homosexuality and society's attitude to it; Wilde deliberately flaunted convention and was punished by the British justice system, Gide was somewhat more circumspect in his activities but eventually came out as equally if not more flamboyant in his literary work (and later his personal life).
So, why is this interesting to me? Well, in the first place I have been doing a bit of Wilde exploration, and while I didn't know much about Gide, I know of him, so this seemed like quite a nice way of continuing the background-filling-out for this particular period. I'm not sure I'm quite in the mood for reading Gide at the moment, but that is neither here or there. The value of doing the parallel lives treatment for an Englishman and a Frenchman in this period, besides being applaudably Plutarchian, is that it highlights the European dimension of literate society in this period - something I hadn't really grasped in previous Wildean escapades. The sense of interaction of the Parisian and London sets, not to mention the English aristocracy's habit of spending large amounts of time in Paris and the nicer parts of Italy, and what one might call the international gay circuit, are all rather well depicted, and you get a sense of interlocking worlds that was entirely new to me.
There are problems, of course. As it is written as a popular book, references to source material are nonexistent, as a rule, and there is a certain amount of paraphrasing and journalistic speech that makes me go 'and I would like to see the primary source that makes you say this, please' - but such are the perils of academia. Apparently Gide's memoirs are quite fruity, not to mention Wilde's own papers. As Fryer quite happily acknowledges, pretty much everything is also inconsistent, as both Wilde and Gide (not to mention Lord Alfred Douglas, swine that he was) were accomplished and extensive myth-creators. They fashioned images very craftily, and were willing to shift away from reality in order to keep their respective personae intact. But while those kinds of source questions are acknowledged, and indeed quite carefully discussed, other kinds of source questions arise from the very style the book is written in. The problem is that the self-same style makes it eminently readable and very entertaining.
I am guessing that this would set the teeth of any scholarly expert thoroughly on edge. However, for the average reader, it's a good read, providing it is approached with the knowledge that Fryer deliberately dramatises to entertain.
