![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
New fantasy book set in Oxford, and featuring JRRT and CSL as characters, as well as Port Meadow and Wytham Wood (as settings).
The FT on Alan Garner.
It also occurs to me I should read Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood as well as William Horwood'd Duncton Wood (another 'Oxford'-based fantasy, which sounds like Watership Down, except it's about moles in Avebury/Rollright Stones).
And on a different subject: Edith Morley memoir published (first female professor at an English university - Prof of English Language at Reading in 1908)
This is what an upper-class Victorian woman was reading c. 1850 (library blog on commonplace book): really great snapshot, but, alas, a lost cause in pedagogical terms. Nothing will ever dislodge the firm student belief that 19th c. women authors were downtrodden, forced to cower under pseudonyms lest the baleful eye of the 'patriarchy' eviscerate them where they stood. What was obvious to any Victorian - that novels were mostly things written by women for women - in very large quantities - simply fails to penetrate modern preconceptions gleaned from popular culture (and perhaps reinforced by certain forms of literary criticism/theory that shall remain nameless). The students come in with these notions, and they leave with them in tact, and no amount of empirical evidence will make the slightest dent in their bias. And then people wonder why Daily Mail-reader types remain insusceptible to evidence-based arguments.
The FT on Alan Garner.
It also occurs to me I should read Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood as well as William Horwood'd Duncton Wood (another 'Oxford'-based fantasy, which sounds like Watership Down, except it's about moles in Avebury/Rollright Stones).
And on a different subject: Edith Morley memoir published (first female professor at an English university - Prof of English Language at Reading in 1908)
This is what an upper-class Victorian woman was reading c. 1850 (library blog on commonplace book): really great snapshot, but, alas, a lost cause in pedagogical terms. Nothing will ever dislodge the firm student belief that 19th c. women authors were downtrodden, forced to cower under pseudonyms lest the baleful eye of the 'patriarchy' eviscerate them where they stood. What was obvious to any Victorian - that novels were mostly things written by women for women - in very large quantities - simply fails to penetrate modern preconceptions gleaned from popular culture (and perhaps reinforced by certain forms of literary criticism/theory that shall remain nameless). The students come in with these notions, and they leave with them in tact, and no amount of empirical evidence will make the slightest dent in their bias. And then people wonder why Daily Mail-reader types remain insusceptible to evidence-based arguments.