J. Pearce > Recent Status Updates

There;s a lot of purple prose in this book that at first seems really pointless, but then turns into part of the central argument. It's fabulous.

The chapter I've just finished is the one most relevant to my interests. I could happily read a whole book just on the foundation of the League for the Feeble-Minded, and Fingard & Rutherford are engaging and easy-to-read writers. A lot of names to keep track of, though. When I reread later, I may make a list of them.

This chapter "Can the Blind Girl Speak?" compared two published autobiographical works by blind women. I thought the discussion of the first one, by Mary Day, comparing it to slave narratives written at the same time, was interesting, but the second one didn't seem to fit that theme at all.

Just finished the chapter on Laura Bridgman. Because this is a book on literary conventions, the chapter mostly focuses on Howe's Annual Reports about Bridgman, and how Bridgman was presented by Howe, Dickens, and others as a "Sentimental Heroine". I think it's a good argument, although I wish the section about Howe's religious plans for Bridgman had come earlier.

Chapter 5 was awesome and very relevant to my interests re: sentimentality in the Annual Reports of the Perkins School for the Blind. I'm now part way through the Laura Bridgman chapter and equally enjoying it. Yay history!

Chapter 4 was interesting, but repetitive. Focused on one book, "The Lamplighter". The next two chapters look more like my thing, on Institutional Sentimentality & Laura Bridgman.

Chapter 3 is all Literary Crit. Not my cuppa.