Literary Rebels
A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:20th Oct '22
Should be back in stock very soon
How many times have you heard that creative writing programmes are factories that produce the same kind of writers, isolated from real life? Only by escaping academia can writers be completely free. Universities are profoundly conservative places, designed to favour a certain way of writing-preferably informed by literary theory. Those who reject the creative/ critical discourse of academia are the true rebels, condemned to live (or survive) in a tough literary marketplace. Conformity is on the side of academia, the story goes, and rebellion is on the other side. This book argues against the notion that creative writing programmes are driven by conformity. Instead, it shows that these programmes in the United States and Britain were founded and developed by literary outsiders, who left an enduring mark on their discipline. To this day, creative writing occupies a marginal position in Anglo-American universities. The multiplication of new programmes, accompanied by rising student enrolments, has done nothing to change that positioning. As a discipline, creative writing strives on opposition to the mainstream university, while benefiting from what the university has to offer. Historically, this opposition to scholars was so virulent that it often led to the separation of creative writing and literature departments. The Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in the 1930s, separated from the English department three decades later--and it still occupies a different building on campus, with little communication between writers and scholars. This model of institutional division is less common in Britain, where the discipline formally emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But even when creative writing is located within literature departments, relationships with scholars remain uneasy. Creative writers and scholars are not, and have never been, natural bedfellows.
A compelling post-45 cultural history; grounded in rich historical research.... What Literary Rebels ultimately exposes—and this may be its most lasting legacy—is the increasing privatization of the humanities and of creative writing in particular, as neoliberal capitalism proves remarkably adept, continuously, at incorporating into itself even the most "outside" of literary rebellions. * Modern Philology *
Written in accessible language. Well researched, informative and...extremely interesting. * Times Literary Supplement *
Jaillant expands the frame within which we can understand the rise of creative writing-from a somewhat parochial American story to a broader Anglo-American cultural phenomenon. * American Literary History. *
Jaillant's research into British creative writing programmes explores new territory. * Literature & History. *
Literary Rebels is, in the end, a book about desire: the contradictory desires of successful creative writers, the utopian ones of programme founders, the frustrated ones of aspiring novelists with day jobs. * English: Journal of the English Association. *
Situated at the cutting edge of book history ...a timely examination of the beginnings of an academic behemoth of a discipline within the growth of the humanities. * Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada *
Literary Rebels asks intriguing questions and presents extensive research, including a meticulous and impressive works cited section, to point subsequent scholars toward avenues of further exploration of the history of creative writers in Anglo-American universities. * Women: A Cultural Review. *
Literary Rebels is a fascinating insight into the long-running creative/critical debates in University English Literature departments and an in-depth examination of the cultural history of creative writing and its institutionalization (or otherwise) in a transatlantic perspective...overall, this is an important and timely book for anyone interested in the past and future of creative writing within and outside of English Literature as a discipline. It will be useful reading on University Management Boards and at the Office for Students. * Nicola Wilson, Modern British History *
Literary Rebels is thus a series of fascinating case studies divided into two main sections, one focussing on American writers and one on British writers...Jaillant's "'transatlantic" focus illuminates key figures and provides valuable ways to re-evaluate them. * Naomi Booth, Ariel: a review of international english literature *
ISBN: 9780192855305
Dimensions: 240mm x 165mm x 24mm
Weight: 596g
288 pages