a teraz fragment końcowy z marcowego całkiem sympatycznego artykułu z New Yorkera autorstwa
<span style="font-weight: bold">Jill Lepore:
Just the Facts, Ma’am
Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history.</span>
- trochę wyrwany z kontekstu, ale zgrabnie koresponduje z kwestią omawianą niedawno w "romansie hostorycznym" o prawdzie i wymogu konkretności historycznej w romansach
w skrócie i m.in.: o prawdzie historycznej ogólnie, co kto czyta i dlaczego, co kto pisze i dlaczego oraz jak sie zmieniają definicje nazw:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/03/24/080324crat_atlarge_lepore?currentPage=1
oraz o XIXwiecznej literaturze z rozdziałem na płci z Jane Austen w roli głównej
niestety na razie w oryginale...
...oj, wiem tłumaczenie by sie przydało...
"(...)
Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people. The eighteenth century’s fictive history (not to be confused with what we call “historical fiction”) is the history of private life; the history of what passes in a man’s own mind; true to the Book of Nature; and written in plain, simple style, exhibiting both judgment and invention. And it is the history of obscure men. Who are these obscure men? Well, a lot of them are women.
For every Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe, there were a dozen Clarissas, Pamelas, and Charlotte Temples. If eighteenth-century novels are history, they’re women’s history. And they were adored, above all, by women readers. “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity” was the revealing title of an essay published in England in 1797 and in Boston five years later. Everyone from preachers to politicians damned novels as corrupting of both public and private virtue and, above all, of women’s virtue. “Novels not only pollute the imaginations of young women,” one American magazine writer insisted in 1798; they give them “false ideas of life.”
What, pray, was the remedy for this grave social ill? Reading history. “There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history,” Hume wrote in “Of the Study of History” (which is why he gave his lady friend Plutarch’s Lives, and told her it was a novel). But, on the whole, women were not particularly interested in reading history. Hume attributed this to the fair sex’s “aversion to matter of fact” and its “appetite for falsehood.” Men “allow us Poetry, Plays, and Romances,” Mary Astell wrote in 1705, “and when they would express a particular Esteem for a Woman’s Sense, they recommend History.” But why read it? “For tho’ it may be of Use to Men who govern Affairs, to know how their Fore-fathers Acted, yet what is this to us?” Much as writers of history tried to woo women readers, they made very little headway. Near the end of the century, Mary Wollstonecraft was left to ask of women: “Is it surprising that they find the reading of history a very dry task?” (After publishing her “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” in 1792, Wollstonecraft started writing a novel, “Maria; or, the Wrongs of Women,” to make sure that her arguments would reach women readers. Her husband, William Godwin, had it published in 1798, after she died, in childbirth.)
Women were not only not interested in history; they didn’t trust it. In “Northanger Abbey” (completed by 1803), Jane Austen’s comic heroine, who adores novels, confesses that she finds history both boring and impossible to credit: “It tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” Austen saw fit to echo this exchange in “Persuasion” (1818). “All histories are against you,” Captain Harville insists, when Austen’s levelheaded heroine, Anne Elliot, argues that women are more constant than men. “But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men,” Harville guesses, and Anne agrees. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” she observes, saying, “I will not allow books to prove any thing.”
By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, too. And most historians, along with their readers, were men. As the discipline of history, the anti-novel, emerged, and especially as it professionalized, it defined itself as the domain of men. (Women might write biography, or dabble in genealogy.) Eighteenth-century observers, in other words, understood the distinction between history and fiction not merely and maybe not even predominantly as a distinction between truth and invention but as a distinction between stories by, about, and of interest to men and stories by, about, and of interest to women. Women read novels, women wrote novels, women were the heroines of novels. Men read history, men wrote history, men were the heroes of history. (When men wrote novels, Godwin suggested, this was regarded as “a symptom of effeminacy.”)
As Burrow’s “A History of Histories” and Wood’s “Purpose of the Past” make clear, however, much of what distinguished eighteenth-century fiction from eighteenth-century history is now part of how academic historians write history. Most of the popular history books you’ll find in Barnes & Noble celebrate the public lives of famous men, but the history books that many academics have been writing for the past half century concern the private lives of ordinary people. (Memoirs constitute a related but distinct genre, chronicling the lives of both the famous and the not so famous, and borrowing from the conventions of history and of fiction. Fake memoirs, like Margaret Jones’s or Misha Defonesca’s, borrow from those genres, but without achieving the legitimacy of either.) “By the 1970s,” Wood writes, “this new social history of hitherto forgotten people had come to dominate academic history writing.” Maybe the topics that have seized professional historians’ attention—family history, social history, women’s history, cultural history, “microhistory”—constitute nothing more than an attempt to take back territory they forfeited to novelists in the eighteenth century. If so, historians have reclaimed from novelists nearly everything except the license to invent . . . and women readers. Today, publishers figure that men buy the great majority of popular history books; most fiction buyers are women.
Is “history at risk”? If women barely read it at all, and if men mostly read books with titles like “Guts and Guns,” it just might be. “A History of Histories” and “The Purpose of the Past” offer a useful reminder that history is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else. But, as for telling stories, maybe historians still have a few things to learn from novelists. Reading Jane Austen being I think very excusable in an Historian. "
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a teraz cos z innej beczki:
czy romans mieści się w pojęciu "literatura kobieca"? i co waszym zdaniem jest "kobiecą literaturą"?