This section of the dissertation continues the structural analysis of Anne Listers papers by examining the interplay between her letters and journal entries.
LHMP
Blog entry
I've developed a system of notetaking and speech to text transcription that is enabling me to keep up with my post a day for June, but there's one aspect of processing publications for the blog that I am having to delay until later. One of my side projects is creating a database of vocabulary related to lesbianism and sex between women based on primary sources quoted in the publications or on primary sources that I identify based on them. But creating the database entries involves a lot of typing of things that would not work well for the automated speech to text function.
This dissertation does a lot of setting the stage for the analysis, by digging deeply into the physical and structural aspect of Lister's records. It's always tempting to dive directly into the juicy content, but by focusing on the details of the structure, Orr is able to identify subtle shifts in how Lister treats different people and subjects.
I must confess that I am a methodology nerd. When I'm reading a historian's work, I love to hear all the details of how they're approaching the material, how they're interpreting it, and how they're presenting it. In my own nonfiction reading, I sometimes feel that this matter overwhelms the meaningful content of what I'm writing about.
It's been along day involving a flat tire and I'm tired, so no clever intro today.
Today's section of Orr's dissertation looks at the ways in which other researchers have interpreted Lister's life.
Orr's dissertation aims to approach the Lister documentary material from previously unexplored angles. So the first step is to map out the existing landscape. (To be honest, it sometimes feels like Orr is criticizing previous work for not having studied aspects it didn't set out to study. But I guess a dissertation needs to justify its existence.)
In order to make this dissertation manageable, I will be posting it in smaller segments--portions of the fairly lengthy chapters.
When I pulled together the journal articles in my folders on biographical topics for this cluster I also added a couple other publications that I had in electronic form on the topic of Anne Lister. As one of those items is a doctoral dissertation and another is a collection of articles, these materials are likely to see me through pretty much the rest of June. There is, as I sometimes comment humorously, an entire academic industry of Anne Lister studies.
When it comes down to it, the Codrington divorce trial is not a shining example of much of anything. Maybe Helen Codrington and Emily Faithful had a lesbian affair? But the divorce trial was about Helen's heterosexual extra-marital relations. The hint of the threat of a revelation of Emily's sexual orientation comes into play only to prevent her from testifying on Helen's behalf. And it's quite possible that the testimony Helen wanted her to give would have been false in the first place.
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