All about fiction

Just in time to be of huge help to any students studying for exams this summer, or still facing university interviews to study English, are three TV programmes currently airing. Yes, you really can justify sitting in front of the screen to ‘help you study’!

Wider reading and success

One of the things that a crammed term of revision no longer allows time for is wider leisure reading. And yet something that always impresses examiners and interviewers is a candidate’s ability to refer to more than just the set texts they have studied in class. If you can link your ideas on a particular text to other literature of the time, or trace the concerns of the novelist to the social movements of their era, you will be heading for an A*.

Speedy literary context help

Now the Beeb is running a season on fiction and there are some really illuminating programmes to catch:

• Faulks on Fiction - At 9pm Saturday on BBC2, author Sebastian Faulks is tracing the development of various types of character that recur in novels. So far he has covered ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lovers’, demonstrating how our perceptions of what makes a literary hero or lover have changed through the last three centuries. Lots of clips from TV adaptations bring his observations to life. Catching it on BBC i-player means that you don’t have to sacrifice your social life!
• Birth of the British Novel - At 9pm Monday on BBC4 an even more helpful series is being fronted by Henry Hitchins. This charts developments in novel writing from the earliest Robinson Crusoe to the present day. It is great for demonstrating how authors created, then adapted, different prose genres, either reflecting or subverting the literary context of their times. Again there are numerous drama clips as illustration.

English Language help

If you are taking AS/A2 English Language, another literary themed broadcast focuses on text production:

The Beauty of Books – Just before the Birth of the British Novel, at 8.30pm Monday on BBC4, as this series moves through the centuries it becomes ever more pertinent to the AS/A2 Development of Language modules. Already the second episode has considered the implications of moving from hand scribed manuscripts into print, thereby creating a medieval best seller with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Handy social context help

Meanwhile (in case you didn’t already know), Crossref-it.info has got lots of helpful articles about the worlds inhabited by Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Romantics and Victorians. They will help you to make links between your set texts and the political, social and philosophical movements of the day. Lots of brownie points there!

Every success!

Invisible barriers

One of the hardest aspects to understand about a culture are the unspoken values that govern it – the things that nobody makes clear but everybody assumes. English literature inevitably reflects English culture, which in turn has been shaped by the nation’s position as a democracy, its Protestantism and its geographical location, among other things.

It is hard to gauge how far this history has influenced British attitudes, yet it is surely part of the desire to look outward, to express individual opinions and be self determining, which we see in characters like Elizabeth Bennet, Pip, Jane Eyre and the Mayor of Casterbridge.

Class wars

However, all these literary creations also encountered another invisible value that shaped their existence – that of social class. How one sector of the population judges another is usually a mystery to the outsider, but the problems it poses are real enough. Class can determine:

> who one can marry

> what employment is acceptable

> where one may live.

Of course, encountering such obstacles has provided great material for the English novel in particular. Can the labourer Pip ever really be a gentleman? Should clergyman’s daughter Margaret Hale be united with a cotton manufacturer? Will Miss Bennet’s vulgar mother always ruin her chances in marriage?

Does it matter?

When today’s society is much more mobile and egalitarian, it may seem hard to understand what all the fuss is about. That’s why at Crossref-it.info there is now a helpful article on English class and hierarchy to guide readers through the minefield of these invisible attitudes. Next time you wonder just why Angel Clare’s parents are anxious about his marrying Tess, why not check it out?

The status of girls

Fighting for their rights

Mass demonstrations in Egypt. Our screens are filled with men and women demanding that their democratic rights are actually reflected in the way their country is governed. These are remarkable scenes, but all the more so when you realise that just 60 years ago there would have been no women involved, because before 1956, Egyptian females were not allowed to vote!

Today, girls in the UK have the same rights in law as their male counterparts:

• They can vote once eighteen
• They can get a job in almost any sphere of employment
• They are paid an equal rate as lads for comparable work
• They can have their own bank accounts, get their own mortgages, possess their own property.

But of course!

The long struggle

In fact it has taken a long time to reach this level of equality. A new Crossref-it.info article on Female emancipation gives you the gen.

The novels Crossref-it.info has featured recently demonstrate just how vulnerable young women have been in the past:

• The new guide to Wide Sargasso Sea depicts how Antoinette Cosway can be handed over as part of a financial transaction to marry a man she hardly knows. It demonstrates her anger and fear as she sees him become the possessor of all that had once been hers, while incarcerating his wife in the process.
• In the Jane Eyre guide, we see how an orphan whose relatives reject her is at the mercy of a capricious employer. When she has to escape his attentions, she can only become a vagrant. With no male to protect her or provide references for alternative employment she is powerless to change her situation, other than relying on charity.

How we got there

No girl today would expect to find themselves in the same situation, but that is owing to the long struggle by women to achieve parity with men. But if you think it’s all over, watch out for the forthcoming Crossref-it.info guide on Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale …

Taking time out and defying convention

Delayed publication

The author of Wide Sargasso Sea, on which Crossref-it.info has just launched an A Level guide, had quite a job in getting her manuscript to a point of publication:

• In 1957 Jean Rhys told her editor, Diana Athill, that it would be ready in six to nine months time, claiming that a large part of it was already written
• In fact, the writing of Wide Sargasso Sea was not finished until the end of March 1966
• Diana Athill wrote to Jean about ‘the labour and torment’ that had gone into its writing. No doubt she was referring to herself as the editor, as well as to its author!

A new approach

Rhys was writing using innovative forms and a variety of perspectives. It took her a while to work out how these could be utilised to create a narrative whole. During that time, her life and work disappeared from popular view.

At Crossref-it.info we too have had to take some time and work out a different approach with our guide to Wide Sargasso Sea.

Like you, we know that the future of literary study lies on-line rather than in a book-case. That’s why we developed a web-based English Literature resource and that’s why it has proved so popular worldwide. For each text we have covered that is not in the public domain, the author’s publisher has understood the power of the medium and granted permission to quote from their text.

Problems and solutions

However, we faced a problem when Rhys’ publisher seemed anxious about having her novel analysed on-line.

What to do? We knew how important it was that the text wasn’t once again rendered invisible to a new generation of students, whose automatic port of call is the internet. It has taken a while, but the whole guide has been re-worked, aiming to be as clear and specific as possible in its explanation of Wide Sargasso Sea, without actually using Rhys’ words. Not so easy for a novel that doesn’t have numbered chapters!

Result

It was worth waiting for Rhys’ masterpiece.

Hopefully everyone who uses the new Crossref-it.info guide on Wide Sargasso Sea will agree that it was worth waiting for this as well!

Why not check it out now?

Wide Sargasso Sea

Some authors are defined by one particular work which overshadows the rest of their output:

• Joseph Heller will forever be identified with his satirical masterpiece, Catch 22
• J. D. Salinger is known primarily as the creator of Holden Caulfield, narrator of The Catcher in the Rye
• Margaret Mitchell did write another novel, but nothing to match Gone with the Wind.

Until the late 60’s few people would have heard of Jean Rhys, who had produced a few collections of short stories and novellas in the 1920s and 30s. By the end of the 1950s many were not even sure if she was still alive. Then in 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea appeared.

For all sorts of reasons Wide Sargasso Sea became the work with which Rhys is for ever identified. It had a huge impact:

• With its multiple viewpoints and disjointed narrative, it echoed the multilayered interpretations of modernism, yet was also post-modern before the term had become recognised.
• Its perspective on a ‘colonial’ account (Jane Eyre), from the viewpoint of the colonised, helped to wake literate Britain up to the role of Britain’s economic world dominance within its literature
• It was revisionist in its handling of a well loved cultural icon, Mr Rochester, shaking forever the unthinking adulation of Brontë’s romantic hero
• It created a woman’s narrative voice at variance with the clear female voice of Jane Eyre herself, whom generations had learnt to love.

All these reasons and more make Wide Sargasso Sea a distinctive novel, and a popular choice on A Level syllabuses, especially when set in conjunction with Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

At Crossref-it.info a comprehensive guide to Brontë’s classic has already been available for a couple of years. Now we are about to launch one to help students studying Rhys’ most famous work.

Watch this space!

Ways in to Rossetti

An intriguing poet

Featuring on a number of current A Level English syllabuses, the poetry of Christina Rossetti makes for intriguing study.

On one level she is very accessible – dealing as she does with universal themes such as love, loss and the impact of beauty. However, there is an elusive quality to many poems, as they seem to allude to a world that is closed off to the inhabitants of an empirical, materialistic, post modern 21st century.

A bid for freedom

Rossetti’s experience of life in Victorian England had a clearly defined focus, developed within the constraints of what was considered acceptable for women in her position. Her strong impulse for freedom of imagination and self expression was instead met through her Christian faith.

Opening up her world

Coming to Rossetti’s work from a background of other religious beliefs or none means that the references she used as shorthand need to be worked at in a way she would not have envisaged. But once the reader sees what she is getting at, her work sings.

Help for students

In September Crossref-it.info launched an extensive guide to Rossetti’s work, in which everything that might be less than clear to modern readers is illuminated at the touch of a cursor (or finger if you are accessing the material via your mobile).

Help for busy teachers!

If you are a teacher wondering how you can engage your students with these texts, it may help to know that this week Crossref-it.info is launching

a series of six lesson sequences on a selection of Christina Rossetti's poems which take the

headache out of planning! There are a variety of different approaches suitable for different styles of learner or levels of ability, as well as keeping in mind the requirements of differing syllabuses.

Whichever way you come to Christina Rossetti, we want you to get the most from the experience. That’s why Crossref-it.info exists!

The Madness of Hamlet

The Madness of Hamlet set in Zimbabwe? How can that be relevant to A Level English students? Well, it depends whether you want an interesting take on a (perhaps overly familiar) text, where the action has been stripped to its story-telling essentials.

• The premise seems impossible – the first folio text acted by only two (male) actors and using only two props? How can a play with multiple characters, plot lines and changes of scene be made sense of, in only 90 minutes?
• In fact the version by Two Gents Productions of Kupenga Kwa Hamlet which I saw on Monday is dramatic and exciting, never hard to follow and throws up some fascinating insights on a well known tale. Physical energy is punctuated by moments of stillness, tragedy offset by easy humour, seeming to recapture the dynamism that perhaps existed in rehearsal 410 years ago.

If you are studying Hamlet for an exam course, the opportunity to see a live performance of the play is highly likely. The central role is seen by actors as the Everest of their early career (as Lear is once they are at the other end of it). Currently performing at the National Theatre is Rory Kinnear, who has garnered rave reviews.

But if you want to think and (re)engage with this classic in a fresh way that still honours Shakespeare’s intentions, investigate http://www.watermill.org.uk/kupenga_kwa_hamlet.html for the chance to experience a great piece of theatre.

And if you want to make sure you know the play before you go, check out Hamlet on Crossref-it.info, where there are handy synopses, as well as detailed information about the text.