The Battle of the Books: The great authors ignored

By Stephen Balch | Monday, October 30, 2000

Jonathan Swift wasted little time on 'Afra the Amazon.' In his 1704 The Battle of the Books, a mock-Homeric epic pitting modern against ancient authors, 'Afra' was just one more scribbler hurriedly dispatched by a classical giant. 'Afra' was, in fact, Aphra Behn, a seventeenth century novelist and playwright reputed to be the first Englishwoman to earn an income writing. Swift has 'Afra' slain by the Greek poet Pindar, who also cuts down the now forgotten satirist John Oldham, and minor poet Abraham Cowley.

From Swift's time to the present, the war over reputation has continued unabated. And despite Swift's savaging, 'moderns' of genius, like Swift himself, have repeatedly fought their way into the canon. Since even the most assiduous reader has only twenty-four hours in his day, some earlier greats have had to be expelled. How many now read Pindar?

Indeed, how many now read Swift? Among English majors, at least, not nearly the number that once did. The battle of the books has lately taken a dramatic turn on our campuses. Amazons are sweeping the field.

As part of a comprehensive analysis of English department course descriptions, the National Association of Scholars examined the frequency with which three hundred and ninety literary figures were named as assigned authors. We confined our scrutiny to programs at the most prestigious liberal arts colleges, places such as Amherst, Oberlin, Swarthmore, and Wesleyan, that act as crucibles of reputation in which the literary preferences of tomorrow's cognoscenti get distilled. The results were startling.

For example, hardly anyone is now more beloved by English professors than African-American novelist Toni Morrison, who, on the basis of citations, ranks as the sixth most popular author of all time. Nobel Laureate though she is, Morrison's seventy citations put her astonishingly ahead of every other American writer past or present, and every Englishman except Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton. (Milton just edges her out by four.)

Moreover, of the six most mentioned authors, half—Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Morrison—are women. For a professor combing through the history of English literature, there will be many more male writers available for assignment than female. It seems unlikely then that this gender balance is attributable to aesthetic judgments alone. How much sense is there in Austen, Woolf, and Morrison each receiving twice as much attention as writers such as Twain, Fielding, Poe, Pope, and even Swift himself?

Race has also become a weapon, or vulnerability, in the reputation wars, but with an impact more modest than gender. Langston Hughes, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright have risen substantially in prominence in recent decades (and their newfound recognition is surely deserved), but aside from Wright, none of these black men has advanced much beyond the middle ranks of cited authors. Not so Zora Neale Hurston, a talented writer of the Harlem Renaissance, who has both color and gender on her side. Tied with Blake, Donne, George Eliot, and Dr. Johnson, and ahead of Twain, Fielding, Poe, Pope, and Swift, Hurston ranks nineteenth in all-time popularity.

The bias in favor of females and minorities stands in sharpest relief when only living authors are compared. While six hundred years of literary history impose some constraints on even the most brazen canon renovators, they have a freer hand in hyping, or dumping, contemporary writers.

Thus, the three most cited living authors are now all 'women of color': Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Walker and Kingston receive many more mentions than any living white male, leading Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow by a ratio of two to one, Norman Mailer by more than three to one, and John Updike by seven to one. Also substantially outdistancing Bellow, Mailer, and Updike is 'multicultural' Salman Rushdie, the most popular living male. On average, the white men among the top-ranked twenty-five living writers were mentioned only 9.5 times apiece. The non-white or female authors were cited an average of 14.5 times apiece. Taken alone, the seven 'women of color' averaged 20 citations.

And the tide of battle continues to flow with the women. Between 1989 and 1997, eight of the top white male authors retreated in prominence, and only three advanced, though Rushdie, the remaining male, advanced further than all the others combined. By contrast, of the females, ten charged ahead, and just four fell back. (Because of a tie for twenty-fifth place, there were actually twenty-six authors among the top-ranked twenty-five.)

Some of these highly rated female authors can be dismissed as tokens, regularly drafted into service out of professorial obligation to assign a writer of correct sex or hue. But their exaggerated stature is symptomatic of something deeper and more troubling: the desertion of English departments from their true colors. The compulsion to promote the merely talented to the ranks of greatness, and the deservedly obscure to conspicuous note, exposes a field where championing social causes, especially radical feminism, routinely triumphs over the claims of art.

This has effects that go far beyond the works assigned. While genuine classics remain a large, if dwindling, body of all undergraduate reading, their interpretation is frequently hacked and skewed to make political points. Shakespeare may have been a white male, but, with the appropriate ideological mutilation, he can be enlisted in any number of gender-bending, postmodern crusades. How much of his liberating vision and stunning beauty survive the faculty press-gangs is anyone's guess.

But what of 'Afra the Amazon'? Unmentioned in any course description in 1964, her five 1989 citations put her alongside Beaumont, Fletcher, and Herrick in 146th place. By 1997, these had swelled to twenty-two, ranking her 56th, still short of Parnassus' peak, but above Shaw, Marvell, Pound, Scott, Auden, and Beckett.

Only fourteen mentions separated her from a certain acerbic Irish churchman.
Jonathan, watch your back!

The Battle of the Books: The great authors ignored

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