Well, that got a bit away from itself...
Jun. 27th, 2013 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
treaseprojectI have *finally* finished my first draft chapter about novels of the English Civil War/Three Kingdoms. It's about three months later than intended, and about eighteen thousand words too long (26k in total); the latter accounts for the former. And it's a mess, since keeping a grip on super long chapters is damned difficult (thank the goddess for Scrivener). There is also yet to be anything as exciting as secondary reading (Blair Worden) or analysis (me).
If anyone is a glutton for punishment/genuinely interested in what novels about this period are like, let me know and I'll send you the rough, but think of it as one of those basted paper dresses--a semblance of the final product, rather than a kissing cousin.
So what did I find: by the time you do the number count, and look at the nuances, these novels are far less "pro King" than initial impressions give; that far from opting for an elitist "x rides with famous man" approach, they are mostly the lives of ordinaryish people; that ideology matters a lot to anyone on the left of the story and that this means many things; and that nineteenth century writers struggled with issues of class and gender and historical veracity in these issues. Perhaps most important that the one thing many of the authors agree on was that what was at stake was what loyalty and patriotism actually meant. President Obama could do with reading a few of these books before condemning Manning and Snowden; his country's political system is, after all, mostly descended from the men who first questioned whether loyalty to country was the same as loyalty to king.
If anyone is a glutton for punishment/genuinely interested in what novels about this period are like, let me know and I'll send you the rough, but think of it as one of those basted paper dresses--a semblance of the final product, rather than a kissing cousin.
So what did I find: by the time you do the number count, and look at the nuances, these novels are far less "pro King" than initial impressions give; that far from opting for an elitist "x rides with famous man" approach, they are mostly the lives of ordinaryish people; that ideology matters a lot to anyone on the left of the story and that this means many things; and that nineteenth century writers struggled with issues of class and gender and historical veracity in these issues. Perhaps most important that the one thing many of the authors agree on was that what was at stake was what loyalty and patriotism actually meant. President Obama could do with reading a few of these books before condemning Manning and Snowden; his country's political system is, after all, mostly descended from the men who first questioned whether loyalty to country was the same as loyalty to king.
