Look at me, reading shit and all

[lunabee34]

Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism by Deborah Lutz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this one. I knew a little bit about most of the people discussed in this book (you can't study Victorian literature without knowing bit about Richard Burton or Swinburne or the Rossettis, for example) but only the very superficial. This is a really interesting look at several loosely connected and intersecting groups of people (the pre-Raphaelites, the Cannibal Club, and the Aesthetes) and how their art and lives were focused on their sexual experiences. The book is written much more like creative non-fiction than the usual academic book, so it's incredibly readable. Every now and again, the author uses an awkward turn of phrase or says something in a confusing way or gets out her thesaurus just to remind us that we are reading the work of the erudite, but on the whole, the style is very readable and accessible and the subject matter is deeply interesting.



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Oronooko: The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not one I'll be rereading. I somehow missed reading this in college and wouldn't have read it now except that I'm teaching it. I know it's an important text, and I'm glad I've read it, but I found it very underwhelming. Also, the almost complete lack of dialogue made reading it fairly tedious.



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Comments

[kore]

Ooh, I LOVE the pre-Raffs (studied them in grad school so I know about Jane Morris and her wombat &c &c). This looks interesting. Did you see that sorta-hilarious Young Romantics series a while back with Aidan Turner? It wasn't that bad, the actresses were cast very well and it was sort of in period. I liked it a lot.

[executrix]

Dickensian, while certainly not the greatest work of cinematic genius ever created, looks like it was cast from the PRB model registry. Bill Sykes looks EXACTLY like the shepherd in "Found," Honoria Barbary is a Stunner, and Compeyson looks like he walked out of The Awakened Conscience. (PS this is one of my TWO Desperate Romantics icons.)

[kore]

Desperate Romantics, that was it!

What I really remember about DR is Amy Manson who was scary perfect as Lizzie Siddal. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/20/92/f7/2092f7c009d3e246ac03e0e0b3d8afa7.jpg

[lunabee34]

OH wow. That is a very good likeness.

[kore]

Her acting was just perfect too. I wanted a show just about her! A friend of mine and I saw it at the time and made up this whole AU in our heads about how she escaped with the baby and went off to live her own life a la the end of French Lieutenant's Woman, heh.

[lunabee34]

I think the way opiates were just laying around waiting to be misused at that time was a huge contributing factor to a lot of people's mental health issues. I didn't know anything about her before reading this book, but I feel really sorry for her. :(

[kore]

Yeah, SERIOUSLY. Laudanum was not anyone's friend.

[lunabee34]

I love the language they used--Stunner is a perfect description of a beautiful woman.

[chelseagirl]

You have Desperate Romantics icons??? I thought I was the only person who ever watched this!

[executrix]

I do indeed have Desperate Romantics icons! In fact I started watching Being Human because I thought of Aidan Turner as the Desperate Romantics guy and not the LOTR guy, and I thought he (and his adhesive bath towel) were the best things about Then There Were None. Although I also really liked Samuel Barnett in Desperate Romantics.

[kore]

he (and his adhesive bath towel) were the best things about Then There Were None

YES

He was great on Being Human, too, even if his story (and the show) kind of went really off the rails into a pit of angst. That first season was wonderful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pUnL5Sd458

[chelseagirl]

And I watched Being Human first, then Desperate Romantics. I was glad for him that the Hobbit movies raised his public profile, even though his subplot was widely mocked. And now he's Ross Poldark! (I grew up with the original.)

I just try to forget that he was born the year I graduated from college. ;-)

[executrix]

I really enjoyed S1 of Poldark but I ragequit S2 because I heard about (spoiler).

[kore]

LOL this is the Desperate Romantics fanclub now. Critics mocked it, but I ate it up.

[chelseagirl]

Oh, it was ridiculous, but also delightful!

Aidan Turner looked like Rossetti looked like in his own mind, I think. ;-)

[lunabee34]

I love that description of Rossetti!

[lunabee34]

The cigar chomping wombat. The poor animals owned by the Morrises generally came to some pretty bad ends.

I didn't see that series. Is it on Netflix?

[kore]

I don't think so, I ahem'd it (I get sick of how NOTHING is ever streaming on netflix, but when I had the DVD plan, they just gathered dust).

[wendelah1]

I'm not a teacher so this is probably a stupid question, but why are you teaching a book you don't think is very good?

[lunabee34]

This is not a stupid question!

There's two reasons. First, I'm frequently asked to teach a new class I've never taught before, and I have to create a syllabus at the beginning of the semester and I don't have time to read everything for the class before the semester starts. So sometimes I pick something that ends up not being very good or engaging or that I don't think works for whatever reason; I just don't teach that one next time.

Second, and this is what's going on here, frequently works that are important are not my favorite. So Aphra Behn is the first professional woman writer; she's a prolific playwright, and Oronooko is arguably the first (extremely short) novel. So in a class called Literature by Women, she's an obvious choice to teach. I think it's also important to note that I don't necessarily think Oronooko is a bad novel; I just don't like it much. It's very interesting in terms of the colonial lens, discussions of slavery, etc. I just find her writing style tedious; there's another professor out there who just swoons over her style, I'm sure. LOL

I think what a lot of people don't realize is that especially when you have a high teaching load and are often asked to teach a variety of classes, the professor is often just a couple weeks ahead of the students.

[kore]

Yeah, I remember from my (VERY SHORT) career teaching and (much longer) EngLit grad student days, the Important stuff or the First stuff (altho what is considered First or Important, a whole other thing) is often not that great. But like Woolf said, we should all go lay wreaths on the grave of Aphra Behn. IIRC she's also writing in the tradition of a kind of mannered style, it's not like Jane Austen who basically came up with her own free indirect thing. I think.

[lunabee34]

*nods*

She paved the way for other women to follow. I suspect I would find her plays more enjoyable than Oronooko, but I don't care enough to go find some and see. LOL

[executrix]

A lot of times, truly great works are hard to fit into a pattern because they're idiosyncratic. The more middle-of-the-road, convention-observing works are easier to say "this stylistic trend and these themes were important at X time, and changed at Y time."

[lunabee34]

*nods nods*

That's very true.

[chelseagirl]

I've taught Oroonoko a number of times. Its place in the history of the novel is such that I don't think it can be fairly judged by contemporary standards; it's a strange book, indeed. I used to use the Bedford Cultural Edition, which had lots of nifty contextual stuff. It tended to teach well, anyway.

[chelseagirl]

P.S. I bought the Lutz book a couple of years ago, and it's still TBR . . . I really need to stop buying books until I've read everything I have . . .

[lunabee34]

LOL

I think you'll like it when you get around to it. I didn't know much about the personal lives of the people she's writing about so it was more enjoyable for me than it might be for somebody who already knows all these details.

[chelseagirl]

Why do I *not* have a job as a Victorianist? I know all the things about them.

Good thing I like the job I do have, and that I did land an academic job . . . but sometimes I feel wasted.

Especially as I'm pondering auditing a statistics course. Bloody quantitative research . . .

[lunabee34]

I know what you mean. I've been in this job 9 years, and I have never gotten to teach a class in Victorian. I have been able to work in Victorian texts here and there in 1102, World Lit 2, and Lit by Women but never a whole class on Victorian. It's annoying.

[lunabee34]

*nods*

I think it'll go over pretty well. Many of my students are very interested in race and all our discussions about that topic (and how race intersects with gender) have gone well.

I agree with you about using contemporary standards. A lot of the stuff I teach in World Lit is stuff I would never read on my own for pleasure because the writing conventions of that time bore me.

[chelseagirl]

I actually did enjoy it, but in a "this is a weird thing from the dawn of the novel and oh she was trying so hard to be antiracist but wow did she screw that one up, but she actually did try which is more than most in her time period . . . " way.

[lunabee34]

Yeah, her sympathy is clearly with Oronooko but she can't divorce her admiration for him with the ways in which he conforms to European standards of behavior and beauty.