Cousin David Pettus Boyd, famous Methodist Minister

A cousin of the Mississippi Stewarts, Boyds, and Costners--famous in late 19th century South Carolina.

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM: "A Clash of Titans"

It's a terrible curse to be 20 or 30 years ahead of your time. My 1984 FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS was trashed by both the New Bibliographers and the New Critics and I thought for sure it was dead until 2007, when I pulled some books down from David Greetham's bookshelves and then looked on Amazon and Google Books for what had been said about it after the reviews died down. I was astounded to see that it has been used by people in many fields although it is still often put down by people in American literature, mainly geezers who had committed themselves to praise of a bungled text, or their students. Today I noticed several pages in Keith Newlin's new $150 OXFORD HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM where my arguments about one book, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, are accurately described and where he says that to read Fredson Bowers's and my exchanges "is to witness a class of titans." (See more in Amazon by looking inside the HANDBOOK.)

Newlin knows I lost to the vested New Critical interests on RBofC, although I was right about readers being deprived of the true experience of reading what Crane wrote, and he writes sadly about that loss to a truncated and nonsensical text. He concludes that Bowers (and his followers, he might have said) were so powerful that Bowers's kind of eclectic editing prevailed as long as he lived, although "with his passing in 1991, the eclectic approach has fallen from favor."

Is this a family trait?--being right long before our time? It's a good thing most of us live a long time. If I had died in 1990 I would have thought that FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS was dead and forgotten.

"DID YOU KNOW . . .?" about Hershel Parker and Kevin Costner?

User Profile: jessicafischerqueen
www.chessgames.com/~jessicafischerqueen?kpage=93
P.S. Did you know that the person usually thought to be the world's leading Melville scholar, Hershel Parker, is actually Kevin Costner's first cousin. ...


http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CDoQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chessgames.com%2F~jessicafischerqueen%3Fkpage%3D93&ei=wvPYToD3H6XaiQKT4ZCKCg&usg=AFQjCNFGcvq0jqTMpxBHT81no6AkdacM7g


Things you find on the Internet!

Checkmate!

Kevin's father, Bill Costner, is my second cousin, Kevin my second cousin once removed.

You know what this means: Bill and I are twice the Costner Kevin is.

One of the 2 Books Brodhead and Delbanco thought I made up: in the list of Top 10 Lost Books of All Time

Another note about the article in the SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE for September 2011. Ever since LETTERS was published in 1960 we had known that Melville finished a book in the spring of 1853 and had offered it to the Harpers. He mentioned still having it when he wrote the Harpers in November 1853. In 1987 in transcribing family letters I learned that the title was THE ISLE OF THE CROSS. The editors of the 1960 LETTERS were both dead, but I got to telephone Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and got to go up to talk to Jay Leyda about it in his hospital bed, months before he died. Just think about the joy Hayford felt, since in 1946 he had showed that Melville had NOT written MOBY-DICK or PIERRE (take your pick, according to the critic you chose) as his "last fling" and renounced writing. Nina Baym in 1979 had ignored all the documentary evidence and claimed that Melville had had a quarrel with fiction and stopped writing after PIERRE until he had to write short stories. Well, no, as we knew in 1979, but now in 1987 I had found the title, and AMERICAN LITERATURE (before Cathy Davidson got control of it) published my announcement of the discovery in 1990. How do you account for Brodhead's implying that I made the book up? I had all the evidence right on the pages he was reviewing for the NEW YORK TIMES in June 2002. Obviously he is incompetent as a scholar or even a reader. Look at what I posted recently about his three times getting "the OTHER way" backwards in his silly chapter on Melville in THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE. But all the evidence about THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and about POEMS (1860) was right there on the pages of my biography. In my diary in 1991 I said "idiotic Brodhead." It's one of those tantalizing notations: you should always say WHAT HE DID that was so idiotic. Incompetent, certainly, but think of the possibility that he knew we were right about THE ISLE OF THE CROSS. (There was absolutely no question about POEMS--everyone had known all about the lost book since 1922--everyone who had read and understood any of a dozen or more basic scholarly books on Melville.) What a hapless Sad Sack New Critic to be exalted to a position of power in two universities. And now one of the books Brodhead implied that I had made up is listed by the Smithsonian Magazine as one of the Top 10 Lost Books of All Time! Brodhead must be one of the Top 10 Biggest Academic Failures of All Time! He has never apologized for trashing my reputation in the New York TIMES. Has he ever apologized to Michael Pressler or the Lacrosse players who were falsely indicted at Duke? To James Van de Velde?

THE ISLE OF THE CROSS

Hershel Parker
What an interesting article in the Smithsonian--"The Top 10 Books Lost to Time." Other Melville scholars figured out that Melville had finished a book in 1853, but in 1987 in one of HM's cousin's letters I found the title, THE ISLE OF THE CROSS, and here it is listed as one of the top 10 books lost to time!

MELVILLE in "THE TOP 10 BOOKS LOST TO TIME" Smithsonian Magazine

http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&title=The+Top+10+Books+Lost+to+Time+%7C+Arts+%26+Culture+%7C+Smithsonian+Magazine&urlID=460929752&action=cpt&partnerID=253172&cid=130199493&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smithsonianmag.com%2Farts-culture%2FThe-Top-10-Books-Lost-to-Time.html%3Fc%3Dy%26story%3Dfullstory

Three terribly ignorant and arrogant people in 2002 said I merely made up Melville's THE ISLE OF THE CROSS, which the Harpers would not print in 1853 and which he subsequently destroyed (as far as we know). One of them published his own "biography" in 2005 and casually mentioned that Melville had written a book called THE ISLE OF THE CROSS. That's Delbanco. The other two were Brodhead and Schultz. Brodhead has had his rewarrd. None of the three has apologized for besmirching my reputation.

Well, here is the Smithsonian Magazine! THE TOP 10 BOOKS LOST TO TIME.