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readingthepast

Please suggest themes you'd like to see covered here! Cut and paste the following into a comment:

ETA: please put your theme in the subject of your comment!

Theme:
Are you prepared to run it? Yes/No
Suggested books, if you have them already:

What does it mean to run the theme?

1. At least one month in advance, you'll let everyone know about the theme and your suggested reading for it. You need to suggest at least 3 works of fiction.
2. On the first of the month, you will post a welcome/introduction/kickoff for the theme.
3. Throughout the month, you'll take an active part in discussion of the theme.

You do not have to be an expert on the theme to run it. You just need to have an interest in it.

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Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

al_zorra

As this is part of our work, I know quite a bit about it. Though knowing about something isn't an essential qualification, of course, for running a theme.

More novels are being published in this general era, as are histories, of the black experience between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, written by really fine writers. Toni Morrison is one of them.

From:

al_zorra

You can find a great deal of the embedded anti-semitism in England between the wars in authors like Evelyn Waugh and Orwell, for instance.

Love, C.

From:

al_zorra

Mrs. Gaskell's North and South, which deeply influenced Bronte to write her Shirley. It's also on dvd.

Love, C.

From:

al_zorra

I'm currently listening to the audio version of A Rose for the Crown by Anne Easter Smith (2006). (War of the Roses; Kate Haute, mistress to Richard, Duke of Gloucester (House of York)

For non-fiction there's a splendid book, Malory: the life and times of King Arthur's chronicler a biography of Sir. Thomas Malory, by Christina Hardyment (2005) with marvelous illos.

This isn't available online though, though you can get it from amazon, maybe. It's a Bit publication and I don't believe any U.S. publisher picked it up. We have it in the NYPL holdings though.

Love, C.

From:

damned_colonial

Yes, that was the first suggested book! *points up*

From:

damned_colonial

Looks good. Shall we call it 19th century New Orleans, just to give it an actual historical period?

From:

al_zorra

Eeeek! I apologize. I was reading frome the botton up.

Love, C.

From:

al_zorra

Yeah that's good.

There are only 3 centuries of New Orleans anyway!

Love, C.

From:

jest

As long as Sarah Schulman book is on the list, I'm happy. "Shimmer" is the first thing I ever read that really gave me an inkling of just what cold war paranoia must have felt like.

From:

jest

For Egyptology we most definitely want Arthur Phillips "The Egyptlogist". I think it's absolutely brilliant.

From:

jest

I've actually written two fanfics about homosexuality in Cold War America

What fandom? I'm currently writing Man from UNCLE slash so I am ALL over homosexuality during the cold war.

From:

vehemently

Another title: Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793, about Yellow Fever in Revolutionary War USA.

M. T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing book I (subtitle: The Pox Party) is, needless to say, partly about the Pox (also in Revolutionary War USA).

I swear people not named Anderson also write novels about diseases too.

From:

vehemently

I'm not sure any of the Just-so Stories qualify as historical. The ones that purport to take place in Africa (and I can only think of two or three in the whole book) are distinctly ahistorical, being mythical tales of how natural phenomena came to be.

Kim might be an interesting work of Kipling's to discuss, in a unit on the British in India, although strictly speaking it is not historical. (I mean, it's old, but he wasn't writing an historical novel when he wrote it.)

From:

al_zorra

I see what you mean about Just So Stories.

What about Maryse Condé's Segu</> and Children of Segu? (Mali and other parts of West Africa.

The Healers - AyiKwei Armah (Ghana and the Asant Empire mid 1800's)

The African - Harold Courlander (the novel Alex Haley plagerized for parts of Roots

The Dahomeyan - Frank Yerby (who also plagerized for this novel parts of Courlander's African.

Whitethorn - Bryce Courtenay (Boer War)

There are so many set in Southern Africa in particular; for instance Zulu Dawn and Zulu - Cy Endfield, the first is both a novel and a movie.

Love, C.

From:

damned_colonial

Theme: Stolen Generations (Australia)
Prepared to run it: sure, unless someone better qualified shows up
Suggested books:

Doris Pilkington, "Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence"
Sally Morgan, "My Place"

Those are two Aboriginal authors. I wonder if we can find something from the POV of the white people running missionary schools etc?

Edited Date: 2009-06-03 01:22 am (UTC)

From:

naraht

Definitely. But is the Jewish experience actually an important theme in any of them, or is it just casual prejudice as a background element?

From:

al_zorra

That's a good question. I'm pretty sure not, unlike Daniel Deroonda, for instance, which Eliot wrote in hopes of doing for the Jews in England what Stowe had done for slaves in the U.S.

From:

naraht

One RPF (on Roy Cohn and his circle) and one X-Files. Both heavily focused on McCarthyism...

From:

badgerbag

judge dee or ti! (Celebrated Cases is the translated one and the rest are fiction by a westerner)

and judge bao.
Judge Bao has made it all the way into Marvel comics!