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Two centuries before Marvel and Star Wars, Walter Scott’s Rob Roy was the first modern anti-hero

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File 20171222 16505 2xq968.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1

Alasdair MacNeill, CC BY-SA

Daniel Cook, University of Dundee

Rival siblings, disappointed fathers, resentful sons, cowards, double-crossers, powerful women, colonial guilt, crumbling Highland estates and an elusive anti-hero: Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy has it all. It is a masterclass of serious pantomime.

Two hundred years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1817, Scott published his latest smash hit, a fictional account of a real-life cattle thief or a freedom fighter, depending on your point of view, during the Jacobite rebellions of 1715.

Rob Roy was a legend in his own lifetime and was soon turned into a flamboyant romantic figure in popular culture.
Classics Illustrated

The huge print run of 10,000 copies was depleted within two weeks and two more editions came out within a year. A legend was born – or rather, reborn – for the story of Robert “Rob Roy” MacGregor had already spread across Europe in his own lifetime.

Even the author of his first major biography, The Highland Rogue (1723), which appeared while MacGregor enjoyed easeful retirement after decades of outlawry, conceded in the introduction that he was rehashing old news about Scotland’s very own Robin Hood.

A tradition of anti-heroes

It is a tale that speaks to a renewed interest in the lives and misadventures of anti-heroes. Han Solo and Chewbacca from Star Wars, Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, and superheroes such as Iron Man and Ant Man are all unlikely warriors who end up fighting against the authorities.

Like Rob Roy, they are mostly thieves in some way, whereas more conventional heroes tend to adhere strictly to impossibly high moral standards that rankle against the practicalities of the modern world: Captain America, for example, is quite literally taken from the war-torn past to save an imperilled present.

The Jacobite Rob Roy agitates in the background to restore the House of Stuart to the British throne after the House of Hanover’s George I had succeeded Queen Anne. For the reader (or anyone watching the film versions) there is a vicarious thrill in championing the anti-hero, the reluctant rebel, the opportunist who overcomes an overwhelming threat.

YouTube.

The anonymously written biography The Highland Rogue begins:

It is not a romantic Tale that the Reader is here presented with, but a real History. Not the Adventures of a Robinson Crusoe, a Colonel Jack, or a Moll Flanders, but the Actions of the HIGHLAND ROGUE; a Man that has been too notorious to pass for a meer imaginary Person.

Invoking the names of fictional characters recently brought to life by the English novelist and spy Daniel Defoe, the unknown author of this London publication likens the real Rob Roy MacGregor to make-believe rogues, even in the act of presenting a so-called “real history”.

Wary of this sort of deadening material, Scott’s strategy in his own retelling was ingenious: his eponymous (anti)hero barely appears in the book. Rob Roy lurks in the shadows (like an 18th-century precursor to The Shadow, a popular comic-book vigilante from the 1930s) under different identities – Mr. Campbell, MacGregor, and Rob Roy – lending support when he can to the confused narrator of the story, the Englishman Frank Osbaldistone.

United Artists/YouTube.

The savage as folk hero

Arguably, the little-seen Rob Roy is sidelined by his own wife Helen, a fearless character in the mould of Princess Leia (“Base dog, and son of a dog,” she says to Rob Roy’s sidekick Dougal, “do you dispute my commands?”). The spirited teenager Diana Vernon who hunts astride a horse as skilfully as any man – and with whom Osbaldistone becomes infatuated – is a similarly powerful and compelling figure.

That said, Scott falls back on the typical depiction of the Highlander as sub-human – a savage – rather than superhuman. Described in The Highland Rogue as uncommonly large and covered all over with matted tufts of red hair, the popular image of MacGregor has more in common with the oafish Little John than with the debonair Robin of Loxley in the old tale of Robin Hood and the Merry Men.

Scott’s English narrator similarly describes in detail what he calls the rogue’s “unearthly” appearance – the “thick, short, red hair, especially around his knees, which resembled … the limbs of a red-coloured Highland bull”. Here Rob Roy sounds more like Chewbacca than Han Solo, though he has the courage of both, and vividly captures the public’s imagination.

Theatre and romance

Many of Scott’s novels and narrative poems have been transferred to the stage and screen – none more so than Rob Roy. Isaac Pocock’s melodramatic play Rob Roy MacGregor or Auld Lang Syne (1818), for one, quickly attained the status of a national pageant, and was even performed before George IV on his famous visit to Edinburgh in 1822.

Part of the appeal of Scott’s novel lies in its vivid theatricality – in addition to Rob Roy’s intriguing appearances, his wife delivers compelling speeches, the gardener Fairservice and the magistrate Jarvie provide comic relief as caricatures of the working classes and landed gentry respectively, and the villainous Sir Rashleigh is dispatched with a bloody death scene. Dark pantomime indeed.

Disney’s almost cartoonish version of Rob Roy, released in 1953.
Disney

Produced by Walt Disney, the 1953 film version devotes most of its screen time to the exploits of its lead actor, Richard Todd, a heroic rebel who escapes by leaping a waterfall and storms a fort with his gang. Such films have provided – and extended – the Hollywood ideal of the plucky underdog. More recently, Rob Roy (1995), starring Liam Neeson in the title role, has little to do with Scott’s novel, not least of all because it foregrounds the shadowy Jacobite as a handsome swashbuckler.

Scott’s character, meanwhile, better fits the current interest in the anti-hero – a dubious, charming half-human (or superhuman) that overcomes the enemy. Importantly, though, the supporting cast of characters (most notably the fearless wife Helen MacGregor, the determined youngster Diana Vernon, and Rob Roy’s loyal sidekick Dougal), also merit attention alongside the eponymous hero.

The ConversationOutside of Scotland, perhaps, Rob Roy and his circle of valiant misfits hasn’t received the wider cultural exposure enjoyed by the medieval outlaw Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men. But, with Scott’s intervention, their stories – and personal failings – make them as compelling as any modern superhero.

Daniel Cook, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Dundee

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Importance of Proofreading

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The link below is to an article that takes a look at the importance of proofreading.

For more visit:
https://madgeniusclub.com/2018/01/08/the-importance-of-proofreading/

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Book Categories: A Better System?

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The link below is to an article that looks at categorising books.

For more visit:
http://lithub.com/theres-got-to-be-a-better-way-to-categorize-the-books-we-love/

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Read More

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The link below is to an article that takes a look at how you can increase the amount of reading you do each year.

For more visit:
https://qz.com/895101/in-the-time-you-spend-on-social-media-each-year-you-could-read-200-books/

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Internet Archive is Facing Copyright and Piracy Issues

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The link below is to an article reporting on a copyright and piracy crisis that is looming for the Internet Archive.

For more visit:
https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/01/09/sfwa-finally-notices-internet-archives-decade-old-open-library-decides-piracy/

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When to Stop Reading?

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The link below is to an article that considers that difficult question, ‘when should I just give up on this terrible book?’

For more visit:
https://bookriot.com/2018/01/05/the-value-of-abandoning-a-book/

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Virtual Reality and Reading

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The link below is to an article that considers what the future may bring for reading when combined with virtual reality.

For more visit:
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/will-vr-be-the-future-of-reading

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Literature has long been sounding the alarm about sexual violence in Hollywood

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For decades, novels have implored readers to look beyond the glamour and riches.
Trey Ratcliff, CC BY-NC-SA

Billy J. Stratton, University of Denver

Recent revelations about Hollywood’s culture of sexual harassment and violence might come as a surprise to many Americans.

After all, Los Angeles – home of what some call “the American image factory” – has long carried the allure of glamour, wealth and fame. Beckoned by the iconic Hollywood sign in the Santa Monica Mountains, the city, in many regards, has become synonymous with the American dream.

People familiar with the industry might tell a more complicated story. That group includes writers who have made Los Angeles and Hollywood their subjects: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Evelyn Waugh, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis. All have chronicled a seamier side of the California dream, a world awash with drugs, sex, violence and abuses of power.

So how did so many of us miss this? Could it have anything to do with the fact Americans who read literature recently fell to a three-decade low?

At the very least, the works of these writers show that literature can play an imperative role in our culture – that novels can give us a means of facing difficult issues that many of us may prefer to ignore, or don’t want to believe exist.

A city of vampires

In numerous novels since the 1930s, Hollywood’s underbelly has been revealed as a landscape rife with peril. And while many writers have explored the vice, corruption and disillusionment at the heart of Hollywood, few have gone deeper into the shadows than Nathanael West and Bret Easton Ellis.

West’s 1939 novel, “The Day of the Locust,” depicts the struggles of Faye Greener, an aspiring actress in pursuit of Hollywood fame and fortune – a dream laid waste by the men she meets along the way, who see her as little more than an object of their desires.

Pursued and stalked throughout the novel, Greener eventually turns to prostitution to make a living. Worse yet, to the novel’s protagonist, she’s the subject of disturbing rape fantasies. The story ends in a frenzy of violence at a Hollywood movie premiere – West’s ultimate denunciation of a culture and a city.

More than 40 years later, the characters of Bret Easton Ellis’s fiction are subjected to almost unspeakable forms of trauma and sexualized violence in “Less Than Zero” and “The Informers.”

In “Less Than Zero,” billboards emblazoned with the words “Disappear Here” loom over the landscape. They’re apparently advertisements that invite a blissful escape to some far-off resort. But for the novel’s main character, they become a menacing warning of a city that devours all who live and work there.

The novel’s main character, Clay, descends into the darkest recesses of this world – a journey to, as he puts it, “see the worst.” And indeed he does.

Although some of the horrors he witnesses occur in back alleys and basement clubs, the most shocking forms of violence – rapes, the viewing of snuff films – transpire at ritzy hotels and posh homes in Malibu, Bel Air and Beverly Hills. We are led to the realization that self-destruction, dehumanization and violence are built into the very fabric of Hollywood’s being.

Meanwhile, the young characters in “The Informers” live in a Los Angeles “swarming with vampires.” Many turn to alcohol, drugs and sex to cope with the depravity of lives that are hopelessly artificial and empty. For some, entertainment has devolved into watching videos of women being terrorized by “near-naked masked men.”

At one point, a main character, the son of a movie executive, meets a struggling actor.

“Unless you’re willing to do some pretty awful things,” the actor says, “it’s hard getting a job in this town.” The reader can almost anticipate the despairing surrender conveyed in his final words: “and I’m willing.”

Other novels, set outside of Hollywood, speak to what can be seen only as an epidemic of sexual violence: Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Louise Erdrich’s “The Round House,” Frances Washburn’s “Elsie’s Business,” Jessica Knoll’s “Luckiest Girl Alive.”

All hold a mirror to a world that many would prefer not to face.

Literature as ‘equipment for living’

Novels cannot replace the immediacy of the testimony offered by the courageous women who, in recent months, have publicly shared their experiences with sexual violence.

Nonetheless, such works can function as a vital corroboration for the heartbreaking truths that these women have revealed. They give a voice to perspectives that are marginalized and silenced.

The critic Kenneth Burke viewed literature not just as a form of amusement or intellectual reward, but as a way of addressing social problems by teaching, as he put it, “strategies for dealing with situations.”

An implicit element of all literature, he argued, is that it gives readers opportunities to imagine how they’d respond to complicated scenarios, from “what is promising” to “what is menacing” – all from the relative safety of our homes. He observed that readers can gain what he called an “equipment for living,” a means to help navigate our daily experiences.

Recent studies reveal other benefits. One found that deep reading makes us “smarter and nicer,” while another showed that reading literary fiction (as opposed to mass market fiction) helps people develop a greater sense of empathy.

The ConversationIn a country whose people have become increasingly isolated from and suspicious of one another, it’s something we need now more than ever.

Billy J. Stratton, Professor of American Literature and Culture; Native American Studies, University of Denver

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Two centuries on, Frankenstein is the perfect metaphor for the Anthropocene era

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frankenstein.

Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University

According to popular understanding, New Year’s Day 2018 belongs to the 68 years since the dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch – where human activity has so dramatically altered the Earth that natural phenomenon is now human phenomenon. Science fiction and fact, indeed all fiction and fact, are persistently mediated by humans. The effects of this blurring show that the role of fictional art (art that is fantasy) is as impactful as ever – perhaps more so, due to its ability to remind us that humans are capable of so much, but are less attentive to our culpability.

Humans now set the trajectory for the current epoch, yet we have little idea how that trajectory will look. We are active, able, creative agents in the world – the makers of the world. And we remain absolutely without a clue as to why we are, or what we are. Whether religious, secular or ecologically concerned, we are still chaotic accidents of organisms who ask the same questions as in other epochs and are responded to with the same resounding silence: why are we here? What are we? What is our purpose?

Increasingly, the value of humans is being questioned in the Anthropocene Epoch – an era which seems to threaten disaster as much it promises longer and better life. Two centuries ago one of the earliest examples of science fiction appeared on New Year’s Day that also asked these questions. Mary Shelley – a political radical, the daughter of the world’s most famous feminist and the wife of an infamous atheist – published Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus.

Even in the title we see that Shelley understood the persistence of the above questions that each age jealously feels belongs only to their particular existential crisis.

Frankenstein 18181 edition title page.

In Shelley’s frontpiece quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Adam laments being created, Shelley immediately reminds us that there is a persistent tension in all tales of human existence between a creator who has the ability, but perhaps not the wisdom, to be accountable and responsible for their acts of creation – and a subject who knows not what to do with the life and knowledge they have been given without their consent or request.

Shelley invoked a monster filled with pathos, humble curiosity and ultimately despair – and a creator whose hubris elucidated him as lacking in empathy, megalomaniacal and whose pride was more important than its effect on other living beings.

While one could say the same of every age, the Anthropocene Epoch seems to be performing Shelley’s tale on a global scale – where a single monster is now many species of non-human, or minorities and oppressed humans. The creator, meanwhile, is governments, nation-driven patriots and multinational companies, much like Shelley’s overweening creator, Dr Frankenstein.

Horror made flesh

Shelley’s Frankenstein legacy has a surprisingly unique offshoot. It spawned, due to the creative genius of the famed make-up artist Jack Pierce, a reimagining of a literary character so different from the original that it has entirely replaced it to become a concrete icon of horror – the monster as incarnated by Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931) and the more faithful (to the book at least) adaptation, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

Jack Pierce turning Boris Karloff into Frankenstein’s monster in the 1930s.
By not known – Image source: http://www.lagorgona.es

While the book had already inspired one of the earliest horror cinema adaptations (the 1910 Charles Ogle film), James Whale’s 1931 film for Universal Pictures was the point which reversed the monster with the creator as the most important locus of the story, so turning it from tale to myth. The shift from focus on the God complex of Frankenstein to the wretched existence of the unloved monster marks a moment of humble self-reflection for audiences who identify more with a pieced together, almost mute, bumbling mass of flesh who simply seeks a “friend”, than with the irresponsibly power-mad scientist.

Perhaps reflecting humans’ focus from their maker (whatever that may be) to themselves, the spectacle of Karloff – placed gnarled, deformed and doubtful of the relevance of his existence after the first world war and heralding the imminent concerns of Sartre’s existentialism – is life meaningful? Are we hear for a reason? Do these questions matter? – evoked the dread and ugliness of a meaningless existence at the intersection of biology and technology made flesh.

Cinematically we have not seen a return to the Gothic Shelley adaptation. Recent versions seem twee compared to Hammer’s 1950-70s viscerality – and the sci-fi robot or genetic creation has overtaken Victorian aesthetics. Sleeker, stronger creations of more metal and less flesh allay our horror at simply being a cluster of mortal cells.

While vampires, werewolves and even zombies are sparkly, sexy and utterly hygienic, it has been a while since we have had a truly corporeally flawed yet articulate monster whose body as a patchwork reminds us of the patchwork of identities and ideologies we are.

The ConversationEmpathy with the monster may be an ideal means of navigating this age. We must embrace difference and vulnerability and reflect on the Frankensteinian powers we exert at the expense of others. We should focus not on why we are here, but how we can be here more creatively, more accountably – as part of a world which, in a way, is its own kind of sewn-together organism of multiple different parts without reason or meaning.

Patricia MacCormack, Professor of Continental Philosophy, Anglia Ruskin University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Schools can’t tackle child literacy levels alone – it takes a village

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More than half of children under two and nearly half of children aged three to five are not being read to every day at home.
Shutterstock

Catherine Wade, Parenting Research Centre

The recently released NAPLAN 2017 results and findings from the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) have got Australia talking again about how our children are faring when it comes to literacy.

Read more: NAPLAN 2017: results have largely flat-lined, and patterns of inequality continue

We know from PIRLS, while most Australian children are meeting international benchmarks for reading at year 4, nearly one in five are not meeting these benchmarks. Australia has one of the largest proportions of students who fall below the “intermediate” benchmark into the “low” or “below low” categories, compared to other English-speaking countries, including the US, Canada, and England.

Despite the range of steps that have been taken to address literacy levels across Australia, a large proportion of children are still not meeting international standards for reading. So what other approaches could we try?

Parents: an untapped resource

New research from the Parenting Research Centre highlights an area ripe for intervention: better supporting parents in reading to their children.

Our findings from a study of 2,600 parents showed more than half of children under two and nearly half of children aged three to five are not being read to every day.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ciPKO/1/

We found, while most children were being read to by an adult in the household four to five days a week, a concerning proportion were not being read to at all or very infrequently. Specifically, 13% of 0–2-year-olds and 4% of 3–5-year-olds were not read to at all by an adult at home in the previous week.

Our research also looked at how important parents’ educational values and aspirations for their children were and how they felt about their interactions with their children’s educators. The survey has national relevance, as most of the findings relate to broader parenting issues.

Why early reading is vital

We know from decades of international research that what parents do at home with their children has a profound effect on children’s learning outcomes. Children who experience enriched, cognitively stimulating home environments are at an advantage in the learning process because they have had exposure to many more words.

The evidence in support of providing a language-rich environment to children is vast. Children with language delays at school entry are at greater risk for academic difficulties. With flow-on effects to later academic and socio-emotional challenges, the imperative to tackle language and literacy problems early is paramount.

Sitting together, opening a book, and reading and pointing to words can be incredibly helpful in building the foundations of good literacy.
Shutterstock

A number of high-quality reviews of the scientific literature show good evidence for the benefits of parental shared reading for children’s literacy.

And while older children typically need less input from parents when it comes to actually looking at words on the page, that doesn’t mean the parents’ role in supporting reading diminishes. Creating a home environment that encourages time and space for books is key.

Read more: Research shows the importance of parents reading with children – even after children can read

If we know reading works, why don’t we do it?

The message that simply sitting together, opening a book, and reading and pointing to words can be incredibly helpful in building the foundations of good literacy has certainly cut through with many parents of young children.

But there are many reasons parents don’t read at home. As we know from sectors such as health, simply telling people what needs to be done – such as exercising more – does not take their personal context into consideration. Alone, it’s not enough to motivate people to adopt new patterns of behaviour.

Considering how best to support parents to read more often to their children is an important question and will depend on a thorough understanding of the barriers that are preventing them from doing so. Family and work pressures and parental confidence around reading books are some possible factors that could be further explored as barriers.

A shared concern

Children’s literacy is not the sole responsibility of parents, but it’s clearly an area where parents and schools can work together. This parent-educator partnership featured in our survey, which explored parents’ views about their interactions with kindergarten, child care and school teachers.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/1bDZe/3/

Most parents (92%) felt comfortable communicating with their children’s teachers. Although 21% did not think or were unsure if their child’s teacher understood their child.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/rK1uG/2/

Also, 20% did not agree they were able to participate in decisions that affected their child at kinder or school.

Of note, fathers tended to feel less comfortable talking with their child’s teachers than mothers did.

While 82% of parents felt their opinions were valued in discussions with their child’s educators, 11% had mixed feelings about this and 7% felt their opinions weren’t valued.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ILYt4/1/

Given what we know from research about the value of parents being connected with their children’s educational settings, it follows that parent-teacher partnerships are important for children’s educational outcomes.

Consequently, it’s important issues like literacy are looked at holistically. Literacy is not just as an education system issue, and not just a parenting issue. It’s a societal issue.

Parents are ready to engage

We found the vast majority of parents (93%) see their own contribution to their children’s learning in the early years as important. This supports the view that today’s parents are generally well placed for taking on information about how to improve their children’s literacy and educational outcomes.

It’s encouraging that most children are being read to at home – even if not every day. But in the context of concerns about Australia’s position in international literacy rankings there’s more to be done.

The ConversationThe message to parents is clearly “read early and read often”. The message for policy makers and professionals is “support parents to better engage with their children’s learning”. This could take many forms and is dependent on context. It could include strategies such as building literacy messages and materials into existing parenting support services and promoting online resources for parents, given our survey found 79% of parents look for answers online about parenting issues.

Catherine Wade, Principal Research Specialist, Parenting Research Centre

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.