Kathy O'Shaughnessy
Learn, Damnit!
Man Does, Woman Is: An Anthology of Work and Gender
By Marion Shaw (ed)
Faber & Faber 243pp £17.50 order from our bookshop
The anthology wasn’t always the thing we know and publishers love . The first ever anthology was an epic undertaking, a collection of six thousand elegiac Greek poems, collated over the ages from 60 BC to the tenth century AD. By 1856 the anthology had shrunk to ‘A collection of the flowers of verse, ie small choice poems, esp epigrams’ (Shorter Oxford Dictionary), fatally paving the way for this century’s anthology mania.
Faber’s newest offering, An Anthology of Work and Gender, which sounds mildly less entertaining than the small choice poems, has a perfectly worthy brief: to show how certain political realities have been expressed, obliquely or directly, through the ages in literature. The subject is the relationship between the sexes and
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete