Stopping at Stonegate

When you commute by public transport, you find that you have a sort of ticking consciousness at either end of the day. As it approaches, the exact time of each train is loomingly there in the sidings of your mind. Do you need to get this one? Go now! [. . .] You can't help being aware when the last moment has passed for getting the 1715, the 1800, the 1850 [. . .] The evening settles down into three straight hours (2045, 2145, 2245) . . . But then, a final flash of seemingly random perversity, the last train at 2337.

(p. 23)

In Everyday Stories, Rachel Bowlby analyses 'everyday' experiences in nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature–commuting, consumption, diary-writing, the otherwise unremarkable day–to suggest a case for their significance. The book joins a number of recent critical studies which are liberally laced with details of their authors' personal experiences. Sally Bayley's From Pepys to Tweets: The Private Life of the Diary (Unbound, 2016), for instance, threads her considerations of the diary form through flashes of memoir and scenes from her childhood. Marina Warner's recent London Review of Books article (a piece which had a previous life as a Weidenfeld lecture at the University of Oxford) explores the slippery meanings of 'brogue', shaping itself around her mother's own pair of shoes.¹

The idea of understanding literature through our lived experience has started to (re)gain a certain amount of academic traction. Rita Felski is a prominent example: she investigates Bruno Latour's 'actor-network theory' to argue for a model of reading which is 'less censorious of ordinary [i.e. contemporary] experiences of reading'. She calls upon critics to be attentive to the feelings they bring to texts and which texts elicit in them, and to recognise that our own cultural frameworks–our everyday experiences–necessarily affect how we handle an artwork.² Felski raises the possibility that we might be able to theorise the subjectively experienced text–literature understood through lived experience, explored in tandem with it, used to reflect on individual lives–and in doing so bring it into a credible academic fold.

As theorisations assimilate the non-expert reader, or suggest that non-expert ways of reading may be respectable, the pressures of impact may have a parallel part to play. Academies and funders worry about making literature relevant and accessible to non-academic audiences. So criticism is published in narrow, attractive volumes, like Oxford University Press's 'Very Short Introductions'. These sell extraordinarily well, with over 500 titles in print. Now they are joined by the 'Literary Agenda' series, of which Bowlby's book is one.

'The Literary Agenda' describes itself, in its series introduction, as a collection of 'short polemical monographs', designed to claim a space and significance for reading beyond 'institutional walls' (p. vii). 'Agenda' is a pointed word, and the series introduction is quick to justify it: its agenda is simply to establish that there is a reciprocal, linking relationship between literature and the world, and thereby to occupy that space.

What does that space look like? The key to the success of 'Very Short Introductions' lies in their alluring promise that a complex subject can be quickly and easily absorbed, perhaps in the enforced spare moments of a journey. A recent article quotes the series' UK editor for humanities and social sciences as saying: 'I like the idea someone can get on a plane to Spain and, within a flight, learn something about Shakespeare.'³ The journey space, whether for a letting-your-hair-down Euro holiday or the serious daily commute to work, becomes a protected reading zone for the otherwise occupied.

So two of the slim titles in the 'Literary Agenda' series begin by positioning their reader within the daily train ride on which, it is more or less assumed, they are likely to be reading the book. Rick Rylance's Literature and the Public Good opens in a tube carriage, with the narrator noting covertly what everyone is reading...