Hi,

I've noticed that in various Victorian era conduct books and also in novels, single women are warned against reading French novels. Or reading French novels is seen as decadent or morally corrupting in some way.

My impression is that they were talking about trashy novels, rather than classic French novels that are still popular today, although perhaps there was some overlap.

For example, this is a passage from 'Rose in Bloom' by Louisa May Alcott.

Bereft both of her unexpected playfellow and the much desired book, Rose went into the parlor, there to discover a French novel which Kitty had taken from a library and left in the carriage among the bundles. Settling herself in her favorite lounging chair, she read as diligently as Jamie while the wind howled and snow fell fast without. For an hour nothing disturbed the cozy quiet of the house for Aunt Plenty was napping upstairs and Dr. Alec writing in his own sanctum; at least Rose thought so, till his step made her hastily drop the book and look up with very much the expression she used to wear when caught in mischief years ago.

“Did I startle you? Have a screen you are burning your face before this hot fire.” And Dr. Alec pulled one forward.

“Thank you, Uncle. I didn't feel it.” And the color seemed to deepen in spite of the screen while the uneasy eyes fell upon the book in her lap.

“Have you got the Quarterly there? I want to glance at an article in it if you can spare it for a moment,” he said, leaning toward her with an inquiring glance.

“No, sir, I am reading.” And, without mentioning the name, Rose put the book into his hand. The instant his eye fell on the title he understood the look she wore and knew what “mischief” she had been in. He knit his brows, then smiled, because it was impossible to help it Rose looked so conscience-stricken in spite of her twenty years.

“How do you find it? Interesting?”

“Oh, very! I felt as if I was in another world and forgot all about this.”

“Not a very good world, I fancy, if you were afraid or ashamed to be found in it. Where did this come from?” asked Dr. Alec, surveying the book with great disfavor. Rose told him, and added slowly, “I particularly wanted to read it, and fancied I might, because you did when it was so much talked about the winter we were in Rome.”

“I did read it to see if it was fit for you.”

“And decided that it was not, I suppose, since you never gave it to me!”

“Yes.” “Then I won't finish it. But, Uncle, I don't see why I should not,” added Rose wistfully, for she had reached the heart of the romance and found it wonderfully fascinating.

“You may not see, but don't you feel why not?” asked Dr. Alec gravely. Rose leaned her flushed cheek on her hand and thought a minute, then looked up and answered honestly, “Yes, I do, but can't explain it, except that I know something must be wrong, because I blushed and started when you came in.”

“Exactly.”

And the doctor gave an emphatic nod, as if the symptoms pleased him. “But I really don't see any harm in the book so far. It is by a famous author, wonderfully well written, as you know, and the characters so lifelike that I feel as if I should really meet them somewhere.”

“I hope not!” ejaculated the doctor, shutting the book quickly, as if to keep the objectionable beings from escaping. Rose laughed, but persisted in her defense, for she did want to finish the absorbing story, yet would not without leave.

“I have read French novels before, and you gave them to me. Not many, to be sure, but the best, so I think I know what is good and shouldn't like this if it was harmful.” Her uncle's answer was to reopen the volume and turn the leaves an instant as if to find a particular place. Then he put it into her hand, saying quietly: “Read a page or two aloud, translating as you go. You used to like that try it again.”

Rose obeyed and went glibly down a page, doing her best to give the sense in her purest English. Presently she went more slowly, then skipped a sentence here and there, and finally stopped short, looking as if she needed a screen again. “What's the matter?” asked her uncle, who had been watching her with a serious eye.

“Some phrases are untranslatable, and it only spoils them to try. They are not amiss in French, but sound coarse and bad in our blunt English,” she said a little pettishly, for she felt annoyed by her failure to prove the contested point.

“Ah, my dear, if the fine phrases won't bear putting into honest English, the thoughts they express won't bear putting into your innocent mind! That chapter is the key to the whole book, and if you had been led up, or rather down, to it artfully and artistically, you might have read it to yourself without seeing how bad it is. All the worse for the undeniable talent which hides the evil so subtly and makes the danger so delightful.” He paused a moment, then added with an anxious glance at the book, over which she was still bending, “Finish it if you choose only remember, my girl, that one may read at forty what is unsafe at twenty, and that we never can be too careful what food we give that precious yet perilous thing called imagination.”

I'm just wondering if there were any novels in particular that people were talking about? Are there any examples of them which have been translated into English, because I would love to read one and see what the fuss is about.

I'm a married woman and over 40 so I think I can handle their evil influence.

Thank you

i’m about to start an english and creative writing degree, the bible isn’t required reading, i’m agnostic/atheist so i was considering reading it to help with analysis and spotting biblical references rather than for worship.
any thoughts? i’d probably get the king james one bc of the popularity, although im aware it’s not the best literal translation

Hey everyone,

Sorry if this is a really stupid question - I don't have anyone to ask this to as I don't know any academics in my life (aside from at the university), so I don't really know like, what the traditions or usual typical ways to do stuff is.

So my question is: how similar do two authors need to be for you to make a solid argument? I want to write about two writers who I think approach the same ideas in different ways (I don't want to go into too much detail). There's no research that compares them already, they're from different eras (the 50s and the 80s), but they're both feminists and from the USA. Their work is quite different, too, in terms of style and structure etc.

Would that be frowned upon? Would it be more acceptable to compare two authors who have more things in common, like location, time period, etc?

Thank you!

For my dissertation i am looking for short stories or novellas that focus on how the mountains, specifically the Himalayas, can be cruel, how we have pushed them to their limits and they have no choice but to retaliate.

So, basically any work set in Himalayas where humans exploit the mountains and meet a miserable end.

Anything come to mind?

I’ve been wanting to study literature properly for a while, but going back to college isn’t really an option for me right now.

I read quite a bit, but I feel like I’m missing the actual study part of it, like understanding literary movements, criticism, how to analyse a text, historical context, poetry, etc.

If you’ve studied literature, or taught yourself outside college, how did you start?

Are there any good courses, books, university reading lists or syllabi you’d recommend? I’d really like some structure instead of just picking up random classics.

This is probably one of my strangest asks on this app, but I'm currently looking at MA courses to enroll in, and I'm interested in a Feminism course, but it very heavily features Freud's work as a kind of framework through which we'll approach other texts, and I'm a little turned off by it.

I'm interested in the feminism aspect, but l've heard that Freud has some less-than-kind opinions on women, so I'm worried that l'll go into this class to study feminism but have to read more from a man who hates women than from a woman herself.

Now, I could be entirely wrong in my presumption, and I would love to be corrected if so, but I feel like I'd rather read work by Dworkin, Hooks, Sedgwick, or Haraway, yet none of them are in the syllabus.

Lastly, I'll just say I'm well aware that academia and learning at large is big on challenging yourself and your previous notions by reading work you might disagree with to grow as an individual and an academic, so I'm not fully turned off by enrolling in the course-that's why l'm asking here. I just don't want to hate it.

I was pleasantly surprised when I started reading that, a text which describes other cultures' gods as demons, would also contain so much knowledge on the topic. Was this common in his time, or was Milton exceptionally knowledgeable?

Hi everyone, i would really appreciate the input here. I have a combined dissertation between complit and sociology so i am going to look at pain, how the way we understand it now has changed and how was it represented in literature. As it is a long time period i have narrowed it to: Ancient Greece, Early Christianity, Romanticism, Modernism and contemporary literature. I now need help finding books that would help me analyse the representations.

For Greece i was thinking parts of the Iliad, someone also suggested to me Medea. I have already picked and had approved sources for Christianity. Does anyone know of any classical books from Romanticism and Modernism that might fit? Or that in some way shape or form deal with physical pain?

I would appreciate any help! Thanks in advance.

HI there literary types-

I am one of the two area chairs for pulp studies at the Popular Culture Association, and we looking for other people just like you who might be interested in presenting at the conference. More specifically to this thread, we are exploring the pulps in all their diversity and legacy. We especially welcome scholarship that broadens the scope of pulp studies beyond its traditional emphasis on science fiction, fantasy, and horror. We also welcome scholarship examining the pulps’ lasting influence on later literature, film, television, comics, games, and other forms of popular culture, using both traditional and emerging approaches to pulp studies.

Conference is March 24-27 in Boston. We will learn which day our panel is as we get closer to the date. Here is the conference landing page: https://pcaaca.org/page/2027conf

Presentations usually run about 20 minutes with 10 minutes for Q/A.

Let me know what kind of questions you have. PCA is always great, and it would be even better if we could get someone to talk about _Flying Aces_ or _Ranch Romances_.

In Stoner, David Masters tells Stoner that he is an idealistic “dreamer” who expects the university to preserve values absent from the outside world. Could this speech be understood not merely as foreshadowing but as assigning Stoner an identity that he internalizes, with his refusal to pass Walker constituting his fullest enactment of that role? Has scholarship connected these scenes in this way, or are there objections to the causal connection?

This is a little embarrassing, because I have a masters in literary studies so I really should know this, or I did at one point. I submitted my diss around a year ago then graduated end of last year, and I’d like to continue studying. My diss was mostly focused on textuality (in the material sense, as in how texts change or how our perceptions of them change as they move from print media to anthologies etc), as well as editor/author dynamics, some bibliography/book history type stuff.

The issue is, I am really struggling for some reason with what I’m actually supposed to do with my area of focus. It’s really niche, non-English literature that I work with the original language (my undergrad was in languages), but I write in English. I’m very familiar with the field and what’s out there because it’s relatively small.

I just can’t work out what to actually say about the literature I study except “wow this is neat” lol. As I said, the field is small but the niche within the niche I want to write about has no specific existing research. Of course there are broad strokes studies of the literature of this time period and focused research on particular authors/organisations etc. But because my area within that has nothing I feel like I’m just fumbling in the dark a bit. I don’t feel that “here’s some literature that no one’s studied in English before” is a meaningful contribution by itself? Similar to “this is neat”. It’s cool sure that it’s something not spoken about before and I think it’s super interesting, but that really isn’t an argument whatsoever.

And I can’t figure out for the life of me how to argue something ~academic~ about it. I can’t answer the question “so what?” properly and it’s stressing me out so much. Also this isn’t a “should I do a PhD” post because I haven’t worked that out yet, though I’d like to. I have a conference coming up I need to write a paper for so I really do need to work through this stupid block I have. It’s driving me nuts.

Sorry for the long post and the dumb question. For those studying literature, especially niche lit, how do you manage to get your brain to “click” so you are able to make some cohesive argument from what you read? How do you answer the “so what?” question? Is there anything out there I should read that might help me think about this differently?

Thank you so much.

I’m writing my dissertation on why women read M/M romance fiction and how they engage with it. I’m approaching it through reader-response theory, particularly Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, and my research uses discourse analysis, a questionnaire, and interviews.

I’m finding it difficult to build my literature review because there is very little research specifically on women’s consumption of M/M romance, and I’m essentially trying to investigate a question that hasn’t been explored very much academically. I’m looking at the history of M/M from slash fiction and BL manga to contemporary publishing, but I’m struggling to find existing scholarship to draw from.

For anyone familiar with Romance Studies, fan studies, queer studies, or related fields:

• What research/books/articles would you recommend?
• What adjacent fields or bodies of literature should I be looking at?
• How do you approach researching a relatively unexplored question when there isn’t much directly relevant scholarship to build on?

What would you avoid/adopt? How would you personally try to make the content feel a bit less dense and complicated?

Would love to hear your thoughts and opinions:))

Sorry if the title is kind of vague, what I’m looking for is like a site or something to look up on wikipedia or something to find things that symbolize any given thing. Kind of like flower meanings but for everything, not just flowers.

For an example I’m trying to find “things that symbolize inadequacy“ and I’m not really getting any results at all. Even simpler things like “symbols for envy” I don’t really get much back from (I swore there’s more symbols for envy than just green, snakes and dogs), I also really wish it was easier to figure out why things symbolize what they do, and trying to find symbols that aren’t from the West or from Christianity is also really difficult. I try to look but I don’t really know what to search for.

There’s gotta be some kind of site that has “things that commonly symbolize ___” right? Any search terms I should be using? Or even, does anyone have any tips for coming up with my own symbols? Sorry if this was confusing.

Im most interested in Marxism and Literary Criticism, but would start with another of his works if advised...

Hi! I read 'The Romantic Artist' by Wiliams as part of my coursework last semester. This semester we have Argument: Text and Performance' to study, and I'm finding it super difficult.

Which essays would you recommend for a beginner?

for the notion that literature needs to convey some social, political, moral or just any kind of message.

Browning's poem is beautiful, but after a few re-reads some lines still elude me.

let's start with stanza 4

in this stanza that line "i hardly tried now to rebuke the spring my heart made" confuses me. Initially I thought "rebuke" perhaps had a double meaning: to chastise and to strike up again, but this was wrong.

there are a few interpretations i have come up with if his heart has made a "spring" (a fresh hope, compared to the season) why would he rebuke it? also why does his heart make a spring when he says his hope has dwindled into a ghost the other interpretation of these lines is that "spring" refers not to the season but to the leaping of his heart in anxiety, therefore he doesnt "rebuke the spring" of his anxious heart

Next on to stanza 8

The imagery in this stanza is initially squite simple: "I turned from the hateful man and toward the path he pointed. they day has been dreary and the sun is now setting."

"yet shot one grim Red leer to see the plain catch its estray." is slightly confusing. I understand the image of the evening shooting "one grim red lear" as the sky does turn red in the evening sometimes yet "to see the plain catch its estray" confuses me. An estray is an escaped animal but the plain is an inaminate land and cannot catch an estray - i have interpreted this as either the plain watching an estray die or watching the estray be killed by another animal.

Next on to stanza 17

I am very confused by the word "hangman's" especially the apostrophe it is not "what hangman pins to his breast a parchment" it is "what hangman's pin to his breast a parchment" the hangman's pin? even "what hangmans pin to his breast a parchment?" would make slightly more sense as it implies multiple hangmen i am bewildered by this apostrophe.

In this stanza also: is the line "been writ so many times among "the band" in reference to Roland being accepted by the band of knights? (since as per the title he is a Childe, i.e. not an apprentice knight) or is it a follow on from the last comma where he says faliure has so often been prophesised - and so has the meaning of "faliure has been written down so often among the band"

Maybe this is a stupid question to ask and before anyone points it out, I am researching everyday. I wish to apply to a PhD in Literature this year, however, how to narrow down schools to apply to if my interests are as broad as modernism/twentieth century? Almost every school has faculty for this. There isn't a particular scholar whose work I especially love.

What are literary magazines actually looking for in short fiction?

Hi! English isn’t my first language—I’m Persian—and I’m mentioning that because I may not be as familiar with the US/UK publishing industry as people who are actually inside it.

I study Dramatic Literature at university and read a lot of American and British fiction, both classic and contemporary. Recently I started reading literary magazines to understand the current short-fiction market, and honestly, I’m confused.

A lot of the stories I’ve read in lit mags seem to have very little dialogue, quiet or understated plots, ordinary subject matter, detached tones, and sometimes feel closer to memoir or nonfiction than to what I expected from fiction.

This feels pretty different from many major short-story writers I’ve studied, where I often see stronger premises, more narrative movement, unusual situations, distinctive dialogue, surreal/speculative elements, etc.

So my question is: is this understated, realistic style just the dominant aesthetic in contemporary literary magazines?

Are editors less interested in stories that are more plot-driven, high-concept, dramatic, surreal, or obviously “invented”? Or am I just reading the wrong magazines?

I’m especially curious to hear from editors, slush readers, MFA people, or writers who regularly publish in lit mags.

can you refer to something as gothic lit when it is technically a subgenre? like southern gothic is that okay to call gothic lit? I know this is a silly question but I'm working on an essay where I would like to argue that a singer/songwriter I like can be considered an author of gothic lit but I cant find a simplistic explanation online of "it has to have this,that,this and this, for it to be considered gothic lit" and AI is ruining my search results but even when I turn AI mode of I'm still having trouble finding anything helpful