One of the most ironic things to every happen to me in an English classroom was when my professor tried to argue classic European literature was diverse.
Was he right? Perhaps. While it isn’t my field of study, there are likely a multitude of authors from diverse backgrounds from that era. But out of the 15 books we were reading, 1 was by a woman (white) 1 was by a POC, and none were by a WOC.
Classic European literature contains diversity. But it’s not the fiction we stress as necessary canon. And that’s something worth being terribly critical about.
omg Agreed, 99% of texts that are assigned when made to read classical lit is just. So bad. I mean, no. No, this really doesn’t count? There is nothing?? Literally nothing?
Except on the rare occasion there is someone who isn’t white. and I could probably admit that, yes, okay, to possibly there is some diversity. At a stretch.
However, that ‘diversity’ never stretched beyond racism, sexism, and classism, and a whole range of other such tropes that meant that, ultimately, any ‘inclusion’ was inherently not worth it. It was abhorrent. Any ‘diversity’ that existed played on the racist stereotypes and if anything solidified them in that period of history. In short, there might be ‘diversity’ but it sure as hell wasn’t good.
Sorry, all I’m thinking of is Tarzan. The original Tarzan. If you have not read it, don’t. It’s bad. Like, Hoooooooolllllyyyyyy shite that is a racist book series. Like. omfg. But it’s still ‘diverse’ classical literature. It has more than one POC, in fact! And has a WOC! BUT IT IS NOT WORTH IT. (The WOC was Esmerelda – the maid to the Porters).
I should have clarified: when I meant diverse lit I wasn’t talking about lit written by white men with racist/sexist/classic tropes. I meant books written by authors who are POC and/or Woman.
I’m sure there are writers of those identities from those time periods. Their work just isn’t taught enough. And thus lies the problem, perpetuating a myth that straight white men created all the “canon” lit worth reading. (and this isn’t even getting into that what we consider English canon wasn’t always originally written in English, leaving no excuse for us to not include classic works from POC in different languages in our canon for classes in literary tradition, but that’s another topic)
I’d love for a few medievalists to weigh in if they can.
I’ve always felt like you hit Virginia Woolf and lit scholars are like “AND THEN SUDDENLY WOMEN EXISTED.”
For ‘classic’ European literature, I’m going with a definition that is ‘famous European authors before the 20th century.’ (Mainly because diverse representation changes starting around 1900, as historical records become richer and more accessible and cultural norms begin to loosen.) Of course there are always writers from all walks of life in all periods of time in Europe. And a bunch of them can even be found in your average list of figures in Western literary ‘canon.’ (Although worth noting is that the notion of ‘Western literary canon’ literally consists of ‘if you asked 50 or so scholars, which names would fairly consistently turn up on their lists of biggest names?’ It is indeed a popularity vote.) But:
1: Even if they’re considered part of the ‘classic Western canon,’ you usually don’t start learning about anybody on the list besides the old white dudes until you hit upperclassmen literature seminars. Since they don’t get taught in high school or gen ed courses, only hardcore readers and history/literature majors end up hearing these names.
2: Even if they ARE suitably famous and widely taught, like Alexandre Dumas, educators seldom bother telling you, “Oh, btw, Dumas’ mom was an African woman.” (She was a slave in Haiti; his dad was a French nobleman so you can probably imagine how that might’ve gone down.) Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: hella famous poet, also black (Creole on his mother’s side). Or Alexander Pushkin: that’s a name that non-lit majors might conceivably know but oh hey, I personally didn’t realize till just now that he was about ¼ African and in fact took so much pride in it he wrote poetry about it sometimes. (Guess which of his poems don’t usually get taught.)
Off the top of my head, for important medieval women writers in Europe I can remember Margery Kempe, Hildegard of Bingen, and Christine de Pizan. Starting in the 1700s you’ve got names like Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Mary Shelley and her mom Mary Wollestonecraft, George Eliot, Christina Rosetti. Women writers in Europe really begin having a presence in the late 1700s, for a number of reasons, one of which is Mary Wollestonecraft.
A few famous European authors who are Jewish: Kafka, Proust, Karl Marx (there’s some horrible irony).
Some famous pre-1900s queer* authors (always difficult to judge in hindsight, since most of them had to code it and it thus becomes a matter of interpretation, aka which lit geeks are shouting the loudest): famously Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron, but we’ve also got Walt Whitman, Nikolai Gogol, Emily Dickinson, Proust, Sir Francis Bacon, possibly Christopher Marlowe, probably Shakespeare, there’s a good case for Herman Melville (it’d sure explain a lot about his books).
* I use ‘queer’ because 1: the understanding of ‘homosexuality’ is complicated by changing cultural contexts across time and place, and 2: no fuckin’ way was Byron homosexual. Today we’d probably call him bi or pan. Similar for Marlowe and Shakespeare, if indeed blah blah blah.
Disabled writers: Successful and famous people with disabilities are EVERYWHERE in history, including many of the biggest names, but no one bothers pointing out, “Byron had a congenitally deformed leg” or “F. Scott Fitzgerald had what was probably dyslexia.” (There are actually a hella lot of definitely or probably dyslexic writers.) George Bernard Shaw would’ve probably been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD today. Dostoyevsky: epilepsy. John Milton: blind.
Mentally ill writers: It’s hard to diagnose through the lens of history, but we know Tolstoy suffered from depression.
Kafka had depression and social anxiety. Poe was quite possibly bipolar. Emily Dickinson: probably depression or maybe even bipolar. William Blake: probably either schizophrenic or something similar brought on by long-term exposure to toxins in his printing work. So many depressed writers, honestly. So many. My theory: mental illness doesn’t make you more creative, but being creative can help you communicate it and survive it.
Anyway, the moral of this diatribe is: this isn’t some kind of legacy of historical bias hanging on like some hard-to-shed vestigial bigotry. We don’t hear about these writers because one way or another, scholars and educators TODAY aren’t telling us they exist. (Even my own lists up there are white-dude-heavy where it’s not specifically about not-white-dudes.)
Oh, also, in the medieval period African and Muslim writers were producing at LEAST as much work as European writers were, and it was just about equally accessible to the continent because 1: trade was going gangbusters between those regions (the Silk Road was a Thing), 2: periodic wars brought back lots of culture and documents to Europe along with the returning fighters, 3: people were STARVING for entertainment and so troubadours would wander the countryside sharing tales they picked up from other countries because yanno, EXOTIC (there’s a lot more to it than that, but you can read about troubadours on your own time), and 4: many of Europe’s best scholars went traveling to those nations because many of them were rich as sin and had all the best universities and libraries at the time. So it’s total bullshit that we don’t introduce kids to Muslim writers and African writers and Hindu writers and Japanese writers a lot earlier, because their stuff is just as good, thought-provoking, historically important and extant. Yes, important to our own white-ass European history, because our own famous writers were reading those works and then using them to inspire their own creations. You in fact cannot gain a full understanding of what was going down in the culture of medieval Europe if you don’t take a look at the influence of BLACK MUSLIM SPAIN on the rest of the continent during that period.
So yeah. There’s that.
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