Book News: Creative writing programs, rebels in the academy

Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities

BY LISE JAILLANT

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192855305

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/literary-rebels-9780192855305

How many times have you heard that creative writing programs are factories that produce the same kind of writers, isolated from real life? Only by escaping academia can writers be completely free. Universities are profoundly conservative places, designed to favor a certain way of writing--preferably informed by literary theory. Those who reject the creative/ critical discourse of academia are the true rebels, condemned to live (or survive) in a tough literary marketplace. Conformity is on the side of academia, the story goes, and rebellion is on the other side.

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This book argues against the notion that creative writing programs are driven by conformity. Instead, it shows that these programs in the United States and Britain were founded and developed by literary outsiders, who left an enduring mark on their discipline. To this day, creative writing occupies a marginal position in Anglo-American universities. The multiplication of new programs, accompanied by rising student enrolments, has done nothing to change that positioning. 

As a discipline, creative writing strives on opposition to the mainstream university, while benefiting from what the university has to offer. Historically, this opposition to scholars was so virulent that it often led to the separation of creative writing and literature departments. The Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in the 1930s, separated from the English department three decades later--and it still occupies a different building on campus, with little communication between writers and scholars. This model of institutional division is less common in Britain, where the discipline formally emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But even when creative writing is located within literature departments, relationships with scholars remain uneasy. Creative writers and scholars are not, and have never been, natural bedfellows.

• The first history of creative writing programs in Britain and America
• Sheds new light on the relationship between writers and scholars from the 1930s to the present day
• Draws on extensive work in neglected archives and oral history interviews with distinguished creative writers
• Offers a new model of scholarship in hybrid archives, comprising paper and born-digital documents

Lise Jaillant is senior lecturer (associate professor) in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. She specializes in twentieth-century literary institutions, with a special interest in publishers and creative writing programs. She is author of Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 (Routledge, 2014) and Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde (EUP, 2017) and editor of Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (EUP, 2019). Taken together, these three books offer a broad overview of Anglo-American publishers in the early-twentieth-century, and their influence on the diffusion of modern literature.