Reflections on My Academic Writing

Jill Durey

Reflections on my academic writing

The processes of writing have changed since I began my PhD in Comparative Literature in the early 1980s. The computer has transformed the way in which I compose and draft my writing. This has altered the way I approach research and writing.

I am not a prolific writer. To date,I have publishedonly three books and of course many articles. I have never had confidence in my work or my writing. This is due partly to the fact that my initial degrees were in languages. I have felt like an audacious intruder into territories belonging to others. It was not until we emigrated with our two small children 40 years ago that I ever considered that I might lecture in literature to fund my children’s education. Yet, having wandered into territories not my own, I have found excitement and curiosity in my desire to know more about these overstepped discipline boundaries.

Having planned my chapter outline for my PhD, I conducted my research for each chapter separately. Once I had completed the research and made extensive notes for a chapter, then made notes on notes, I hand wrote the chapter, then re-wrote it. It was not until my supervisor had approved my entire PhD that I handedover my manuscript to a typist. I could not type, never having needed to do so.

On completing my PhD, I went into private school teaching—teaching English Literature at a co-educational school. After two years, I became Head of English at a private girls’ school. My husband spotted an advertisement for the position of English Lecturer at Edith Cowan University two years later. As my PhD had lain unpublished for four years, I applied.

Writing and publishing my PhD as articles and a book was straightforward. I learned quickly how to type on the computer given me by the University. My PhD was on realism in the novels of three nineteenth-century writers, English, French and Russian. I had used linguistic theories as I had studied the works in their original languages. My book, published in Germany, condensed the essence of my very long manuscript and included an extra biographical chapter. Biographical readings of literature had been deeply unfashionable, but I am fascinated by people and by the links between literature and what I call the real world. This chapter looked at correlations between the lives of the three authors and their works and, I think, provided valuable insights in textual interpretation hitherto lost to readers unacquainted with the authors’ life experiences. My articles, though, I approached differently. As I had studied the writers in three different languages and cultures, I was able in some articles to focus simply on one aspect of one writer, or, as in one article published in a French journal on comparative literature, on the testing of a linguistic theory across all three writers. At this stage, as my research had virtually all been completed in the PhD, all I had to do was extract certain nuggets from the manuscript and compose a reasoned article around them, while ensuring that I inserted any new relevant critics and theorists. Having published as much as I could from my PhD, I needed a new research topic. My writing at that time concerned the disciplines of language, linguistics and literature.

A very senior colleague suggested that my career in English literature would benefit from my making myself less ‘exotic’. I therefore selected an unfashionable nineteenth-century writer regarded as English as beef-steak to tackle a fresh area without competing with others, at the same time as tapping into my existing knowledge of nineteenth-century writing. Fascinated by the links between writers and their worlds and discerning that, despite my writer’s devout Anglicanism, no one had examined his writing about the Church, even though many of his characters were clerical, I decided to write a book on this topic.

As with my PhD, I began with a chapter outline and researched and wrote each chapter separately, except this time I was able to type my work straight onto the computer, although I still hand wrote notes while doing the research. The other difference was that I did not have to submit my work to a supervisor or an examiner, or wait until the whole work was finished before publishing. On completing each chapter, I re-read it to see if I could extract an article.I did not consider journals within Australia as my topic would not have been of interest, although my writer had visited Australia a couple of times to see his son and had written a book on Australia. It was easier with some chapters than with others to extract articles, since each chapter played an integral role in the single themed book.

I had not contacted a publisher as I did not want a contract with a short deadline. I wanted to enjoy the scenic route. I was also aware of the requirements made of me in teaching and administration in a new university seeking its place in the academic world, having just emerged from training secondary teachers. I was eager to help this transformation, believing that my research would benefit from the slow-cooking.

Once I had completed the manuscript, I submitted it to a publisher. They took months to respond and asked for several changes, giving me a year. They gave every writer a maximum number of words, under a hundred thousand, which was difficult to achieve for such a large canvas of work. Once they had read it again, they gave me a contract to tailor it to their referencing, formatting and stylistic requirements. That book and its articles had wandered into the disciplines of history and theology, and scrutinised the writer’s whole oeuvre of fiction and non-fiction. It had also, like my earlier book, considered the biographical details of the author andembraced genealogy.

Having concentrated on one writer for this book, I wanted to wander into a new area. A senior colleague in genetics had chaired one of the university committees on which I was a faculty representative. He had been interested in my genealogical articles. Catching sight of me on the stairs, he told me that what was needed was someone to trace the prevalence and effect of cousin marriage in nineteenth-century fiction. This intrigued me, and gave me an excuse to wander into the disciplines of medicine and genetics and to read authors in English fiction I had not yet encountered, as well as to considerthe religious and cultural beliefs of other races and nationalities, many of whom have now migrated to England to live and, unlike the English, still practise cousin marriage. Hovering over the book, too, would be one of the greatest researchers of all times, Charles Darwin, all of whose experiments with cultivation, pollination and breeding in flora and fauna were conducted to prove one way or another whether his cousin marriage to Emma Wedgwood had caused the severe health problems of one of their ten children. He was unable conclusively to do this, but his work eventually led to the new discipline of genetics.

This book had a broader canvas than my previous one. It was based on fifty-four novels and twenty-nine authors from the late eighteenth century to the immediate post-Great War years. It took me ten years. This time it was not just teaching, research, supervision and administration that prolonged the slow-cooking, but also health issues. Research and writing always provided both escape and therapy. As with my second book, I researched and wrote each chapter separately. The sensitive nature of the work, however, made it more difficult to publish. There are many fine scholars of Victorian literature in America and some of the best publishers examining Victorian literature have moved to American soil. Unlike England and Australia, the United States regards cousin marriage as criminal in eight of its fifty states, and illegal in a further twenty-two. The topic provokes nervous giggles from anyone with an American accent, including the literary editor of one of the journals just mentioned. This is despite the final chapter’s focus on those ethnic communities in England today still practising cousin marriage and providing valuable, if tragic, subjects for modern genetic and medical research.

Despite this sensitivity and despite not seeking a contract prior to writing the manuscript, the book was published in Scotland, an article was published in a prestigious English journal and another in the Middle East, where cousin marriage is still practised and there is an increasing scholarship in Victorian literature.

As an honorary member of staff, now retired as an academic, I approach my research and writing differently. Instead of selecting a single theme for a book, I am focusing on one of the twenty-nine writers in my third book and his varied engagements with his world. He wrote at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth and he used his writing not only to depict what he saw, but also to change what he saw. Examining the writer this way has enabled me to begin by writing and publishing separate articles. When I have published enough to cover the main interests of his life, I plan to re-shape and expand these articles into a book, or re-publish them as a collection of essays. This writer’s life has been the subject of several literary biographers, but they gloss overhis preoccupations with seeking justice for those less fortunate than himself, whether they are human or animal, prisoners of serious or minor offences, or disabled in body or mind.

Working with smaller topics, within a large one, has enabled me to research the primary material first and to begin drafting the article immediately, since my empiricist and inductive methodprovides me with the main argument of my article.This is different from beginning with someone else’s theory and shaping materials to prove or apply it. Instead, I begin with the materials to extract any theory. I thus formulate my own ideas and later insert additional insights from secondary sources. I no longer writenotes by hand in my initial drafting. The computer and the smaller topic enable me to begin with my own conclusions drawn from my primary research. Istitch in additional supporting ideas from secondary sources later, reshaping my sentences with my revisions. The computer has made drafting easier by facilitating an organic means of writing and composing. To date, I have had an article published this year, another accepted for next year, and another is under consideration. I am writing a fourth article and have the topic and some materials for a fifth. These articles have already taken me into the disciplines of history, politics, disability theory and animal activism. I am enjoying my wanderings.