A Real Compsy One, in celebration of my Annotated Bibliographing.

Well, y'all, I'll tell you: I've been working in the office this week, and it feels purty dang good to be doing the research like I love to do. A development -- in a beautiful embrace of all things academic -- my annotated bibliography of secondary sources, growing like the weeds that are my lawn and the children that are my heart. My favorite entry, here presented for you (especially Hillary Brown) because it was a delightful surprise amid some boring bookaroos. Also because I have the only copy of the book in town, and I'm not planning on parting with it... yet. So read! And most importantly email me your thoughts!

So here it is, MLAed and everything (except for spacing. Thanks an effing lot, html.):


Disher, Maurice Willson. Blood and Thunder: The Mid-Victorian Melodrama and its Origins. London: Frederick Muller LTD, 1949.

First: “Puff Preliminary” provides a great start: odd, interesting, charmingly hilarious. Anti- the “coldly contemplative eye,” this author introduces an “academic spirit” giving a “rash attempt to chart imagination… [that’s] heavily engaged, like your own, in the struggle to grow up” (5).

Prologue: “Popular Imagination in the melodrama and penny dreadful” – likens spurious ideas to counterfeit (or “queer”) coinage, in that “it came into currency unquestioned, was vouched for by responsible persons, and could not be exposed as counterfeit without upsetting everybody’s reckoning.” “Queer it undoubtedly is,” he writes, “for it has always been interpreted to mean, not a universal contempt for worldly advantages but the reverse—a belief that virtue, though held to be its own reward, is not so unprofitable financially as might be supposed… THE COUNTERFEIT IDEA? the general abuse of “popular fiction” (11-12). Authors also to blame, for dipping from the “stock-pot from which each drew out much and put in little or nothing at all.” (12) Fiction = a brew, in which “there is, or was, a powerful uniformity of wishes” (12). BELIEF IN “Virtue Triumphant”… “There is no parting the two strains, moral and political, in the imagination of the nineteenth-century masses. They are hopelessly entangled” (13). Great Quote: “Democracy shaped its own entertainments at a time when the vogue of Virtue Triumphant was at its height and they took their pattern from it. This merging is the freak of human nature we call melodrama, a word at present denoting self-righteous emotionalism that recalls a bygone, exaggerated style of acting” (14). “Here are Virtue Triumphant’s attendant errors: confusion between sacred and profane, between worldly and spiritual advancement, between self-interest and self-sacrifice, and other hypocrisies which create a peculiar insensibility to the absurd. All this is known as Victorianism and vulgarly supposed to have been brought about through Queen Victoria’s influence” (14). “Victorianism owes less to Queen Victoria than to Madame de Maintenon, that paragon of rigid and affluent piety, desperately clutching shreds of outward grandeur to cover the shame of early vagabondage” (15). “Such typical Victorians as Darwin and Ruskin tried to make popular opinion more adult, but in vain” (15).