Students Protest Book Bans in Pennsylvania School District
Last week’s Literary Links included an article about censorship in a Pennsylvania school. Here’s a follow-up: “students have spoken up, demanding that materials by Black and Brown authors be reinstated in the classroom.”
Becoming the Thing That Haunts the House: Gothic Fiction and the Fear of Change
“This is the conceit of the Gothic house: a person, a presence, who becomes so attached to their place of residence that, for better or worse, they cannot bear to leave,” writes Holly Kybett Smith. She continues, “a fear of change is the fuel, the psychic nourishment that allow horrors to grow and take over. . . .”
Why authors are turning down lucrative deals in favour of Substack
Several of the literary newsletters I receive come from writers who are publishing on Substack. Here the Guardian reports on the Substack model of publishing and whether it’s sustainable.
An Unofficial Ranking of Publishing Colophons
The little logo graphics that publishers use to stamp their brand on the books they publish are called colophons. Dylan Brown examines the history of several of the best known publishers’ colophons.
Et in Ohio Ego: On Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio”
Writing in the Cleveland Review, Domenic Cregan discusses Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of related stories focusing on inhabitants of the town, as a representation of the trope of the Midwest as a place where a “dark underbelly” lurks beneath a genteel exterior.
The Authors of ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’ Are Back With a New (Angry) Book
The book The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, published in 1979, traces what Katie Roiphe calls “the anxiety of authorship” through the works of 19th-century female writers like Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters and Emily Dickinson: “The two critics delved into the conflict between what Virginia Woolf called “the angel in the house” — the good, domestic, female self — and the rage and desire for freedom that accompany artistic creation.”
Gilbert and Gubar have now published Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination. Roiphe reviews this new book, which “tracks literary manifestations of feminist anger from the second half of the 20th century to now,” for the New York Times.
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
