From the desk of Bermuda Blues:
My Fellow Contributors,
I am in the process of researching a paper on Jonathan Edwards's Personal Narrative. I have already gathered the necessary resources. Most of the books I have checked out are secondary criticisms about Edwards and the literature he wrote. However, in order to get a better understanding of who Edwards was as a man and by extension who he was as an author, I have found it is important to learn more than just what another scholar has thought about him. What is important is to understand the environment in which Edwards wrote and the personal factors which motivated him to write.
In order to accomplish this, I have been reading the biography, Johnathan Edwards: A Life, written by George Marsden. This book has been instrumental in helping me get a feel for who Edwards was as a young man as well as the environment he was raised in, which developed his creative genius.
This technique, of uncovering the foundation of an author's motivations and inspirations, is extremely useful when you are critically analyzing personal narratives or literature in the fields of Realism, and Romanticism because in each of these, there are aspects of the author in both the structure and the content. William Wordsworth's Prelude is an example of a poet using language and structure to express the poet's mind. William Dean Howells, the author of Hazard of New Fortunes, put pieces of himself into the characters he created. Basil March and Angus Beaton, the main protagonists, embody many of the same characteristics that Howells saw in himself. By commanding a firm grasp on the stimuli that developed each of these creative minds you would be better able to anticipate and better understand the imagery in each particular author's work.
This understanding will lend its hand in better interpreting what critics are discussing and will help you to see the limits of their criticisms. Finding these limits will help you find a place to plant and grow your paper to ensure you are going out to new frontiers of literary discovery.
I end with this: start early and read often. Don't sell yourself out from the possibility of taking literature in a new direction and leaving your mark on the world, if only for your own fulfillment.
Undoubtedly Yours,
Bermuda
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