<i>Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities</i>. By Lise Jaillant

Something that should probably be more readily acknowledged is the degree to which literary scholarship proceeds from personal investment: we are many of us the protagonists of the stories we tell about texts. In the preface to Literary Rebels, Lise Jaillant lays her cards on the table in a particularly forthright fashion: once an aspiring novelist, she had become disillusioned both with the tightly-gatekept publishing world and with the creative writing programme in which she later enrolled, hoping that said programme might have a key to one or more gates. She wound up in a postgraduate programme in literary studies, and the rest is history (in both fact and method, in this case). One might wonder about the prudence of admitting that you had submitted an entire Houellebecq manuscript to a prominent French press under your own name to prove a point, but Jaillant’s main observations throughout this fascinating, frustrating, and ultimately deeply uneven study are stubbornly correct: creative writing is indeed a discipline undermined by its own evolving ambitions, and creative writers in the academy do persistently parrot the lie that they are somehow outside the system that sustains them. Literary publishing is a mug’s game, as she originally suspected, and nearly-arbitrary coteries do still decide who rises to the top of the literary field. Literary Rebels aims to add what Jaillant calls ‘book history from below’ (p. 9) to this account, giving the reader access to what I think is genuinely unprecedented detail surrounding the lives and movements of some of creative writing’s most important figures (and, more interestingly, some of its less important ones). But to what end?

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.