In case no one has enlightened you yet: a PhD isn’t a linear journey. It is full of steep hills that you struggle to climb, followed by sharp descents to rocky lows and rickety bridges that you aren’t sure will hold you up. It is rain, hail, and shine – sometimes all on one day.
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Knowing all of that is good in theory but it doesn’t always help when you find yourself running into a wall. Too often it feels like you will never get past it.
At the start of this year, one of my tasks was to research the history of book reviewing, and integrate that into a broader history of print cultures. All of this would provide necessary background to my own research into the historical promotion strategies of the Australian publishing house Angus & Robertson. I knew I wanted to set up a distinction between literary criticism and a general book review – terms that are too often conflated in current understandings but - I was coming to realise - were quite different in past centuries. I also suspected changes in the nature and function of reviews over time were somehow tied to publishing output. However, none of the scholarship I had read effectively differentiated the terms so I was struggling to articulate the concept. Early supervisor feedback on this section was consistent with my own feelings about it: it was confusing, messy, and unclear.
I faced the mental block for months. A PhD is such a massive undertaking that it is easy enough to bury your head in the sand and distract yourself with making progress in other areas while avoiding the issue, but that isn’t actually helpful in the long run. Yet every time I returned to this section I found myself running into the same wall. I just could not see any way past it. I was in one of the 'lows' of the PhD journey.
This month push finally came to shove and I needed to move past the section. I had to tackle the problem. I started searching for anything that might help. When re-visiting earlier feedback, I noticed two sources my supervisor had recommended months earlier. At the time I had dutifully added them to my ‘to read’ pile. I even placed them near the top of that pile! But the life of a humanities student means the pile is enormous, usually larger than the ‘read’ pile, and new priority readings are always emerging. Further, at the time my supervisor had only made the recommendations in passing as something I 'might' find useful. So it did take me awhile to get back to them.
Well, with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had got to them earlier because, when I finally read them, I discovered those two sources (written forty years apart) perfectly distilled the argument I had been trying and failing to make. Let that be a reminder to promptly follow up on suggested readings, even when suggestions are offered casually.
These moments of clarity are – in my experience at least – few and far between in doctoral programs, but they are some of the most exciting. I sent a lot of overly enthusiastic messages out to friends and family, who did not understand, and to fellow PhDers, who did.
The first source was a book by Derek Roper, entitled Reviewing before the Edinburgh (1978). Roper discussed the significance of eighteenth century reviewing, challenging the dominant narrative that reviewing emerged in the nineteenth-century Edinburgh Review. Importantly, he described the eighteenth-century tradition of ‘comprehensive reviewing’ (that is, an effort to notice all books that were recently published). This term proved to be a lightbulb moment for my own work.
The second source was “Reading in Review”, a 2016 article by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. In that article, Miller talked about how the overproduction of books in the nineteenth century necessitated a shift from the tradition of comprehensive reviewing to a more evaluative, selective assessment of books. It was this style that the famous Edinburgh epitomised.
All of a sudden I have been able to formulate a narrative about the history of reviewing in the context of my own research. As publishing output increased, the objective ‘comprehensive reviewing’ of the eighteenth-century gave way to a new style of subjective, critical reviewing in the nineteenth-century, and by the twentieth-century that progressed into the cult of the ‘star reviewer’ and institutionalisation of literary criticism.
Having established this narrative about the two dominant forms of book reviews over time, it has been a lot easier to discuss the reviews in my own corpus: accounting for the format and function of Angus & Robertson book reviews in early twentieth-century Australia. What had initially been a brief and somewhat messy and confusing 400words in my Confirmation of Candidature in June 2020 has become a detailed 2,000words (and growing) part of my first thesis chapter. I now argue the Angus & Robertson reviews – most of which appeared in general Australian newspapers – were more akin to the tradition of comprehensive reviewing seen in the eighteenth-century journals, rather than the evaluative nineteenth-century model of literary criticism. In today's meeting, my supervisors indicated my conceptualisation of historical reviewing is now clear, effective, and a powerful contribution to my overarching argument about Australian publishing.
So sometimes, just sometimes, you do find the perfect piece of scholarship which becomes the ladder you needed to hoist myself over the wall, to climb upwards yet again in the tumultuous PhD journey.