Serendipities

This is what’s waiting for me on my desk:

• William Germano, From Dissertation to Book (Chicago University Press, 2005)
• William Germano, Getting It Published (Chicago University Press, 2001)
• Beth Luey, Handbook for Academic Authors (fourth edition, Cambridge UP, 2002)
• Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, Thinking Like Your Editor (W. W. Norton, 2002)
• William Zinsser, On Writing Well (Collins, 2006)
• Richard A. Lanham, The Longman Guide to Revising Prose (Longman, 2006)

You guessed it — it’s time to revise my dissertation for publication. People at the ESSHC conference in Lissabon kept asking me where my thesis was published. Their interest really motivated me to take some action in that department.

I read Germano’s From Dissertation to Book while I was waiting for my delayed plane on the Lisbon airport, and I decided that I need to do what he calls a “deep revision” to turn my dissertation into a publishable book. I need to make my chapters more lucid, strengthen my line of argument, speak more in my own voice instead of that of other critics, and get rid of excess block quotes.

Germano’s book suggests that I don’t contact a publishing house quite yet. He recommends revising the book first, so that I am ready to send it out if a publisher reacts positively to my book proposal. So that is my plan of action now: revise first, then write a brilliant book proposal to sell my Wild Justice: The Dynamics of Gender and Revenge in Early Modern English Drama to a publisher in England or the United States. Ah yes, I probably need a snappier subtitle too.

All practical advice on how to go about turning a dissertation into a published book is greatly welcome!

I was browsing through Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586), and came across this emblem on reading. The motto: Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit — “it is the use of books, not reading that makes wise men.” I have no wise thoughts on the emblem, but it does give a glimpse into early modern reading practices (see also earlier posts here, here, and here).

The volumes great, who so doth still peruse,
And dailie turnes, and gazeth on the same,
If that the fruicte thereof, he do not use,
He reapes but toile, and never gaineth fame:
Firste reade, then marke, then practise that is good,
For without use, we drinke but LETHE flood.

Of practise longe, experience doth proceede;
And wisedome then, doth evermore ensue:
Then printe in minde, what wee in printe do reade,
Els loose wee time, and bookes in vaine do vewe:
Wee maie not haste, our talent to bestowe,
Nor hide it up, whereby no good shall growe.

The concept of reading is expressed in the emblem’s subscriptio (the text below the image) in terms of memory and forgetting. One who reads passively might just as well drink from the river Lethe, which induces a state of sleepy forgetfulness. If you read actively, however, you remember what you learned because your brain is (paradoxically?) like a book: “Then printe in minde, what wee in printe do reade.” Ready access to the volumes of the brain ensures that a wise person puts his knowledge to virtuous use, so that he practices “that is good.”

I thought that the man on the left, assuming he is left-handed, might be writing things down in a little commonplace book, while the man on the right only reads large volumes to forget what he read. But after enlarging the image, I am not so sure the man on the left is writing. Also, perhaps the forgetful reader would have been depicted sitting, rather than standing — or is that too modern an association? The image may even have been re-used from another book, and perhaps should not be interpreted too literally.

Most of you will know Ann Hathaway, whether it be from a biography of Shakespeare, from education, popular literature or the internet. The image most people have of her is based on a few facts. When they married, for example, William was eighteen while Ann was twenty-six and several months pregnant. In his will, William left Ann his second-best bed. In the words of Germaine Greer, she “left a wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare’s Wife convincingly shows how biographers have filled this void with their own ideas of what Shakespeare’s wife would have been like. In the popular imagination, she or her parents and friends forced the young Shakespeare to marry her after a roll in the hay at Shottery. A few years later, Shakespeare escaped to London and led a wild life among the brothels in Southwark. Here, for example, is a quotation from the page on Ann’s life on the website of Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare:

At 26, Anne knew the way of the world while William was still a troubled youth, unsure of his path and coping with the collapse of his father’s businesses and the uncertainty of the times. After William turned 21, there would be no more children for Anne and him. There would instead be long absences as William later toured the country and set up home amongst the theatrical community in London. There would be extramarital affairs and head-turning passions for the poet, and he would encounter much more of the world than Anne in rural Warwickshire ever could.

The great thing about Germaine Greer’s biography of Ann Hathaway is that she challenges the representations of Ann that are commonly taken for granted, even (or perhaps especially) among academics. In a podcast she says that it was her reading of Stephen Greenblatt’s biography Will in the World that made her want to write this book, but her biography includes revealing quotations from many other works besides Greenblatt’s.

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My hopes of Apple ever releasing an e-book reader with beautiful software and the same sleek looks as their new MacBook Air were crushed by the New York Times this morning. In an interview, Steve Jobbs declared that the idea of e-books is based on a fundamental mistake:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.