Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 3rd, 2013 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I Just Finished Reading
Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, which gets quoted in anything anyone writes about nationalism ever, so I figured I should read it. Actually, I'm pretty sure that I could have gotten away with reading just the introduction, because that's where he lays out his theory, but the rest of it was basically a recap of the last two centuries of world history, which is surely useful.
What I'm Reading Now
Frances Hodgson Burnett's The One I Knew Best of All, which is her memoir about her childhood. I wish I had known about when I was writing my honors project about American girls' literature around 1900, because I could have absolutely gone to town on it. And then I could have included A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, too!
Now, on the face of it these books seem self-evidently British, BUT - they are also totally American. Burnett wrote all her books in America, she became an American citizen, she published A Little Princess originally in the premier American children's magazine St. Nicholas - which received letters upon letters from American children who adored the story, because her writing was tremendously popular in America
Also, there's a marked similarity between her heroines and those in patently American novels, which is pretty much the sole reason that people give for including Anne of Green Gables in studies of American girls' literature around 1900, never mind that L. M. Montgomery was and remained forever Canadian.
What I'm Reading Next
Sanditon, probably.
Or maybe The Last of the Mohicans, which I may need for a project. None of the excerpts I've read suggest to me that this will be anything but agonizing, but sometimes one must make sacrifices.
Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, which gets quoted in anything anyone writes about nationalism ever, so I figured I should read it. Actually, I'm pretty sure that I could have gotten away with reading just the introduction, because that's where he lays out his theory, but the rest of it was basically a recap of the last two centuries of world history, which is surely useful.
What I'm Reading Now
Frances Hodgson Burnett's The One I Knew Best of All, which is her memoir about her childhood. I wish I had known about when I was writing my honors project about American girls' literature around 1900, because I could have absolutely gone to town on it. And then I could have included A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, too!
Now, on the face of it these books seem self-evidently British, BUT - they are also totally American. Burnett wrote all her books in America, she became an American citizen, she published A Little Princess originally in the premier American children's magazine St. Nicholas - which received letters upon letters from American children who adored the story, because her writing was tremendously popular in America
Also, there's a marked similarity between her heroines and those in patently American novels, which is pretty much the sole reason that people give for including Anne of Green Gables in studies of American girls' literature around 1900, never mind that L. M. Montgomery was and remained forever Canadian.
What I'm Reading Next
Sanditon, probably.
Or maybe The Last of the Mohicans, which I may need for a project. None of the excerpts I've read suggest to me that this will be anything but agonizing, but sometimes one must make sacrifices.
