Essential Writers? O rly?
Feb. 26th, 2008 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniFrom the front flyleaf of that volume of Jane Austen I recently bought:
Those "essential writers" are all listed on the back flyleaf:
I counted. That's twenty "essential" writers, and only one of them is a woman.
This "library" is being marketed as some sort official starting point for someone looking to fill the gaps in his or her literary education. It would be perfectly reasonable for that hypothetical someone to come away with the idea that "Women don't write 'literature,' except for the one that proves the rule."
Now, granted, women have, through the years, had less access to education than men, and less economic freedom which would have allowed them to pursue writing, so I wouldn't expect a list that spans two hundred years to have absolute gender parity. But nineteen to one in the favor of the men strikes me as a just a bit extreme.
So here's my challenge to you, dear Readers: which of these male writers would you take off the list, and which female writers would you insert in their place? I think a ratio of four to one (five female authors out of twenty total) seems reasonable. And for consistancy's sake, there seems to be a rule that writer have more than one complete book published in her name.
I have my ideas. But I'm looking for more.
*Ah. So that's why I could only find this heavy, clunky, hardbacked volume, instead of a more portable paperback: B&N doesn't want to sell any edition from a rival publisher (And they also want to promote themselves as being just a bit hoity-toity and "cultured," so it's a hardback "library" for them). Humph!
**He wrote more than one?
[ETA:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samantha2074 is right. There are a few twentieth century writers on the list, but they're all, except for Hemmingway, from before the Great War. And that, dispite the calender, really is the turning point into the Twentieth Century (So say I :-P). So that brings up another bias: why must the essential "finest works" of the world's "greatest literature" be so distant from us, culturally?
I got my Bachelor's degree from a very traditionally-minded liberal arts college, and I nearly got my Master's from another. And even though they're the sorts of schools that oft get criticized for being fuddy-duddy and teaching "Dead White Men," my education was a lot more hip and wide-ranging than Barnes & Nobel standards!]
Jane Austen: Seven Novels is part of Barnes & Noble's Library of Essential Writers. Each title in the series presents the finest works--complete and unabridged--from one of the greatest writers in literature [yadda, yadda, yadda]*
Those "essential writers" are all listed on the back flyleaf:
- Jane Austen Seven Novels
- Lewis Carroll Complete Works
- Joseph Conrad Complete Short Stories
- James Fenimore Cooper Five Novels
- Daniel Defoe Five Novels
- Charles Dickens Five Novels
- Alexandre Dumas Three Novels
- Gustave Flaubert Five Novels
- E. M. Forster Four Novels
- Ernest Hemmingway Four Novels
- O. Henry The Fiction
- Jack London Six Novels
- Edgar Allen Poe Fiction and Poetry
- Robert Louis Stevenson Seven Novels
- Bram Stoker Five Novels**
- Leo Tolstoy Three Novels
- Mark Twain Five Novels
- Jules Verne Seven Novels
- H. G. Welles Seven Novels
- Oscar Wilde Collected Works
I counted. That's twenty "essential" writers, and only one of them is a woman.
This "library" is being marketed as some sort official starting point for someone looking to fill the gaps in his or her literary education. It would be perfectly reasonable for that hypothetical someone to come away with the idea that "Women don't write 'literature,' except for the one that proves the rule."
Now, granted, women have, through the years, had less access to education than men, and less economic freedom which would have allowed them to pursue writing, so I wouldn't expect a list that spans two hundred years to have absolute gender parity. But nineteen to one in the favor of the men strikes me as a just a bit extreme.
So here's my challenge to you, dear Readers: which of these male writers would you take off the list, and which female writers would you insert in their place? I think a ratio of four to one (five female authors out of twenty total) seems reasonable. And for consistancy's sake, there seems to be a rule that writer have more than one complete book published in her name.
I have my ideas. But I'm looking for more.
*Ah. So that's why I could only find this heavy, clunky, hardbacked volume, instead of a more portable paperback: B&N doesn't want to sell any edition from a rival publisher (And they also want to promote themselves as being just a bit hoity-toity and "cultured," so it's a hardback "library" for them). Humph!
**He wrote more than one?
[ETA:
samantha2074 is right. There are a few twentieth century writers on the list, but they're all, except for Hemmingway, from before the Great War. And that, dispite the calender, really is the turning point into the Twentieth Century (So say I :-P). So that brings up another bias: why must the essential "finest works" of the world's "greatest literature" be so distant from us, culturally?I got my Bachelor's degree from a very traditionally-minded liberal arts college, and I nearly got my Master's from another. And even though they're the sorts of schools that oft get criticized for being fuddy-duddy and teaching "Dead White Men," my education was a lot more hip and wide-ranging than Barnes & Nobel standards!]
