Wikipedia:Featured article review/Augustan literature/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was removed by User:Joelr31 18:56, 29 December 2008 [1].

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Augustan literature

Review commentary

Users notified: Geogre, Bishonen, Portal talk:England

This article fails 1c and 2c of Wikipedia:Featured article criteria

• Criteria 1(c) factually accurate: claims are verifiable against reliable sources, accurately represent the relevant body of published knowledge, and are supported with specific evidence and external citations; this requires a "References" section in which sources are listed, complemented by inline citations where appropriate;

Although there is a list of References at the bottom of the article, they are not specific to statements claimed. Some of the statements seem to be personal opinion or the opinion of a particular group, but not necessarily representative of various opinions given their due weight as in NPOV. The article can be seen as a scholarly essay representing a particular view or evaluation of the subject of the article.

• Criteria 2c: :consistent citations—where required by Criterion 1c, consistently formatted inline citations.

This article was promoted in 2005 when the standards were more lenient. —Mattisse (Talk) 21:18, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

What statements do you believe require inline citation? Christopher Parham (talk) 23:17, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

• This article has no citations whatsoever. Wikipedia:OR states: "Citing sources and avoiding original research are inextricably linked: to demonstrate that you are not presenting original research, you must cite reliable sources that are directly related to the topic of the article, and that directly support the information as it is presented."

Examples:

• ' "Augustan" derives from George I wishing to be seen as Augustus Caesar'
• "Alexander Pope, who had been imitating Horace, wrote an Epistle to Augustus that was to George II and seemingly endorsed the notion of his age being like that of Augustus, when poetry became more mannered, political and satirical than in the era of Julius Caesar."
• Outright quotations are not cited; examples,

• 'Thomas Babington Macaulay would say of Anne that "when in good humour, [she] was meekly stupid and, when in bad humour, was sulkily stupid." '
• '"we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been, when the best of men followed the employment" '
• ' "all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery." '

• Seemingly POV comments are not cited: "There were other satirists who worked in a less virulent way, who took a bemused pose and only made lighthearted fun."
• Essay type statements are not cited: "The parodic satire takes apart the cases and plans of policy without necessarily contrasting a normative or positive set of values. Therefore, it was an ideal method of attack for ironists and conservatives—those who would not be able to enunciate a set of values to change toward but could condemn present changes as ill-considered."
• And another essay sample: "These developments can be seen as extensions of Protestantism, as Max Weber argued, for they represent a gradual increase in the implications of Martin Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, or they can be seen as a growth of the power and assertiveness of the bourgeoisie and an echo of the displacement of the worker from the home in growing industrialization, as Marxists such as E.P. Thompson have argued. It can be argued that the development of the subjective individual against the social individual was a natural reaction to trade over other methods of economic production."
• Many words are in quotes "updating", "learned" for no apparent reason. It would be nice to know why.
• Seemingly OR statements are not cited: "To some degree, Pope was adapting Jonathan Swift's habit, in A Tale of a Tub, of pretending that metaphors were literal truths, and he was inventing a mythos to go with the everyday."
• Even if statements are purported facts they should be sourced: "Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) still dominates attempts at writing a history of the novel. Watt's view is that the critical feature of the 18th-century novel is the creation of psychological realism. This feature, he argued, would continue on and influence the novel as it has been known in the 20th century. Michael McKeon brought a Marxist approach to the history of the novel in his 1986 The Origins of the English Novel. McKeon viewed the novel as emerging as a constant battleground between two developments of two sets of world view that corresponded to Whig/Tory, Dissenter/Establishment, and Capitalist/Persistent Feudalist." - Is this the editor of the article's views or whose?
• Another example: 'A particular play of unknown authorship entitled A Vision of the Golden Rump was cited when Parliament passed the Licensing Act of 1737. (The "rump" in question is Parliament, on the one hand, and buttocks on the other.)'

These are just examples. As I said, nothing in the article is cited. The references do not seem to include any current scholarship or reviews of the period. Most of the sources seem primary. Many of the historical ones are dated. And the references are not fully cited. Example

• Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class

—Mattisse (Talk) 00:26, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Disinfoboxman

Delete. No infobox. Also various incorrect commas, and missing dashes. But congratulations to User:Mattisse on managing to restrain himself for almost 24 hours after the FAR of Augustan drama was closed and this one was opened. Perhaps Wikipedia:Unreviewed featured articles can give a clue as to which articles may be next on his "hit list": if he is concentrating solely on User:Geogre's contributions, there is still Jonathan Wild, Ormulum and Peterborough Chronicle; if it is User:Bishonen, there is Colley Cibber and Restoration comedy. It would save time to have an omnibus FAR and damn them all. In answer to the prickly question at Talk:Augustan literature, plenty of authors (let alone readers) of articles such as this one fo not give two figs for the style-sheet form-filling approach. They care more about the prose in the article than "nofootnotes". It would be more of a "downfall" to pander to the current preoccupation with footnotes then murder the article in seeking to save that brown piece of tinsel which is the FA star. -- Disinfoboxman (talk) 11:44, 12 November 2008 (UTC) I attempted to elicit cooperation from posting on the article talk page. I am following the advice of Ottava Rima on the article talk page [2] who said to take the article to FAR if I were not willing to add the citations myself. I expected I would be attacked.[3] The comments above by Disinfoboxman (an editor with few edits to Wikipedia[4]) are remarkably similar to those he posted at Wikipedia:Featured article review/Augustan drama/archive1. I don't think such comments are conducive to a constructive attitude regarding improvement of the article. —Mattisse (Talk) 14:18, 12 November 2008 (UTC) Yes, you attempted to elicit "cooperation" through the hallowed tactic of slapping a nofootnotes template on the article twice, saying - "I am going to replace the tag. ... Please do not remove the tag without fixing the article ... There is no rule that the tagger has to fix the article ... I am unable to fix the tags myself as I do not have the references." This is my favourite form of cooperation, where someone instructs people to do things, and they obey. But there are at least three place we agree - 1/ like you, I expect this article will "fail" for lack of citations; 2/ like you, I am not going to fix it either, because 3/ like you, I am one of those people "just talking" who doesn't care enough to do anything about it. I suspect we may disagree about whether such "failure" is very important. As I said in one of my "few edits to Wikipedia" (so rare, but feel the quality), why not just it over with and remove the brown asterisk from this article and its friends. Do what thou wilt, but the sun will rise tomorrow. Enough from me - I need to save up some electrons for my next post. -- Disinfoboxman (talk) 15:30, 12 November 2008 (UTC) Since this is in a hidden box, I guess I can reply. I have added plenty of references to articles. I have written articles full of references. I fix up plenty of articles that are not mine. So I am not like you who "just talks". Cirt also added the {{nofootnotes}} tag and it was likewise removed without fixing. It was not just me who saw a problem. I have nothing to do with removing the brown asterisk. That is outside my abilities. —Mattisse (Talk) 16:11, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Comments I agree with Mattisse's comments above and I would like offer some specific references that editors could use to improve the article. While much of this article is excellent, there are two ways in which it fails to meet the current FA criteria: sourcing and POV.

1) The article does not use inline citations in the way that has become standard at FAs (whatever the editors think of that practice). Readers need to be able to verify the information that they find in these articles since they have no idea who wrote them - footnotes and complete reference lists allow them to do that. Moreover, the references at the bottom of the article do not cover the claims being made in the article (most of the sources listed are primary sources) and the list does not include the major secondary works on the period. Some examples that should be included in any article about this topic:

• Pat Rogers, Grub Street
• David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century
• Essays by Maynard Mack
• J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels
• Margaret Doody's Daring Muse

2) The article includes a specific POV on literary history rather than presenting the various scholarly views on the topic. For example, in the novel section, the reader learns that Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding were the important novelists who shaped the development of the genre. This is the view of Ian Watt, who wrote decades ago. While we in literary studies still read his work, his view has been serious challenged by many critics since then. Giving Michael McKeon a few sentences does not begin to address the complexity of the "novel debate". The exclusion of the entire amatory fiction tradition, for example, is egregious. Ros Ballaster's Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 is the seminal work on this genre and should obviously have been the basis for at least a few sentences in the article. To give an example of the extremely controversial statements in this section:

• Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) was the first major novel of the new century
• Although there were novels in the interim, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) is the next landmark development in the English novel.
• The dismissive paragraph on women writers and the novel of sensibility is almost comical. It is as if the article is saying "oh, yeah, I have to say something about those 'scribbling women'". The debates regarding "sensibility" are enormous (there are many volumes written on them) - what is its origin? how far back does the tradition stretch? what does sensibility even mean? are there several traditions of sensibility? is sensibility different than sentiment? etc. See, for example, Barker-Benfield's Culture of Sensibility and Mullen's Sentiment and Sociability. The weight given to Defoe and Fielding in this section and the shortchanging of "feminine" genres such as novels of sensibility and amatory fiction clearly introduces a POV into the text. (Even Sterne, who wrote one of the most popular sentimental novels of the eighteenth century, is discussed as a satirist!)

I hope these comments are useful. Awadewit (talk) 18:41, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Nonsense. Watt remains standard. While it's true that there are other discussions, it is not true that any of them are either critical standard or that they are appropriate to get a survey in a survey article. Would anyone here really like to see every single literary theory get a sentence, with a citation? Let's get Paul Hunter involved. Let's get Edward Said's disciples. If you want some new Feminist approaches, then why not Marxist, why not queer, why not post-colonial, why not body? The authors here answered, silently: why not? because this is a survey article, and trying to jam in every book of the month is irresponsible to the reader. In fact, I would argue that Sentiment and Sociability is, in fact, not going to reject Defoe, Feilding, and Richardson as important. It is, instead, going to opt for a separate axis of analysis and therefore foreground a separate line, but without diminishing the old line at all. It's folly to suggest that a survey article have every possible, potential view.

Additional nonsense is the idea that the article reiterates Watt. Indeed, it does not. Watt's analytical principle is psychological realism. McKean's is the dialectic. The article offers nobody's critical principle. As for whether these are "really" the important novels, historically they are. You can argue that it's teleological, like Watt, to look for those things that engendered imitation, but it's also historically undeniable which novels sold best, which stirred imitation, and which were innovative. Take the whole mass of the "scribbling tribe" (an American novelist's complaint), and you won't match the sales. Whether it's unfair or not, it is the historical record, and reflecting the historical record needs no faddish recast.

Furthermore, to say that it is, on the one hand, the old view and then, on the other, that it's POV is contradictory. Which is it? Is it the author's nasty personal research, or is it the background view that informed 50 years of readers? If it's the one, then it's common knowledge. If it's the other, then I would suppose it to have flown in the face of common sense.

All I can say is that I shudder when I imagine what a "good" survey would look like, and I hope that no one attempts to write one, because it will be dreadful, outmoded as soon as written, and so infested with footnotes to obvious and indisputable facts as to be incomprehensible and unworthy of holding on a flash drive, much less a server. Utgard Loki (talk) 17:19, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but you are totally incorrect. Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957) is no longer the standard and I even read parts of the works I listed as an undergraduate. No one is claiming that we should include "every single literary theory", only the ones that shaped the field, per WP:NPOV. Whether you like it not, literary studies has changed quite dramatically since the 1950s (postmodernism, deconstruction, feminist literary criticism, etc.) Awadewit (talk) 17:38, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

And I'm sorry, but you are misinformed or miseducated. Watt remains standard. I'm not sure what "even read parts of the works" as an undergraduate, but it's quite likely that one will toss in fashionable issues-related critical works in an undergraduate class, but it is not likely that one will reorganize a survey class around such critical theories. Those that do will create undergraduates incapable of graduate school, because each of the major literary theories since 1965 has been a reaction against "canon": each is therefore tacitly recreating the positivist theories of the 1950's. That, however, is a complete side track, because your understanding of "what is current" is a series of side tracks. There is no formative, generative model of the organization of The Novel outside of Marxism and Watt. The Marxist view we find in McKeon concurs with Watt on who the major milestones are. To chase down every thrown stick over which other works have competing aesthetics is to lack the ability to speak in survey terms. One can have a survey of the novel according to the development of the woman, a survey of the novel as it encodes and rejects queer identity, a survey of the novel as expression of colonial and non-colonial voices, etc., but each of these requires a critical/analytical principle in the foreground and "history" in the background. The only historical analysis is Marxist and naive positivist. These form the backbones of the study still. I should point out, additionally, that Hunter also maintains Watt's mileposts.

Therefore, again, unless you want to shuffle and reshuffle to have everyone's history-as-determined-by-critical-principle, you can have none. I am sorry, but you completely fail to understand the difference between "literary theory" and "literary criticism," which is always faddish perforce and which has changed since the moment I began writing this comment, and "literary history," which is relatively unchanged since 1950, at least with the novel.

Oh, and please don't assume that those who do not organize information along a specific literary theory are ignorant of that theory. If you were truly an adherent of feminist literary theory, you would want to see this article deleted, as it implies an hierarchical and historicist organization. Utgard Loki (talk) 19:21, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for admitting that the article is organized around a single literary theory - that is my point. Although I myself am a historicist, I recognize that Wikipedia has not adopted historicism as an organizing principle for its articles, therefore I include other theories when I write articles to make sure that they conform to WP:NPOV. Thus, even though I have serious problems with psychoanalytic criticism, for example, I include it in the articles I write (when appropriate, such as in the case of Mary Shelley) because I recognize that I cannot impose my view of literary criticism onto Wikipedia articles. You do not seem to want to accept that we have to present theories that we disagree with. Awadewit (talk) 21:44, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Here are where the direct quotes mentioned above come from:

• all ages and characters is from Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets* by Samuel Johnson (the edition I turned up on Google Books was published in 1866 in Philadelphia by Lippincott & Co).

• shepherds is from Alexander Pope's *A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry* (in his Collected Works).

• meekly stupid is from Macaulay's *The History of England*, Chapter 15.

I note that there are very few Google hits for any of these phrases outside Wikipedia (outside the texts they come from).

Also, the quote from Tristram Shandy's father in the section about the novel should be have you not forgot to wind up the clock?.

Throwawayhack (talk) 11:53, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

You do, of course, realise that FAR is the single most useless thing on the entire Internet. Filiocht | The kettle's on 12:36, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

does it get any credit for persuading you to pop back in...? I only know of you, but geez, it's good to see you :-) Hope you're wonderfully well :-) Privatemusings (talk) 05:43, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

is it possible to 'pan out' at all?

as I mentioned on the talk page of the article, I totally understand folk seeking to drive up standards across the encyclopedia, and I appreciate the dedicated work that many put in... I wonder however if it might be possible to take a little step back for a moment and just consider whether or not we think the article itself is simply wonderful! I do - and I'd hope the 'featured' process isn't unable to offer flexibility and or adaptability in clearly assessing the quality of this article as very, very high.... I don't think it's necessary for Geogre's points on the talk page concerning inline citations to be extrapolated to bring the whole featured system crashing down! - but I think the 'feautured article' crop will drop in average quality for this articles exclusion, and that's both a huge shame, and a dangerous direction. Just one chap's thoughts... Privatemusings (talk) 05:49, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

• PM, as I explained above, there are serious problems with this article. It doesn't reflect modern scholarship and it avoids a discussion of female novelists and their traditions (see specifics above). These POV problems are in addition to the inline citation issue. Awadewit (talk) 05:56, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't doubt your sincerity one bit, but would really really like to encourage you to consider a) how sure you are of such a strong statement and b) whether or not being 'right' in this matter genuinely serves the project / drives quality.. what I can say (as but a fule!) is that I do perceive the danger of a not-so-great dynamic here, and feel that this is one area where FAR might just might cause more harm than good.... I'll bow out here, and entreat folk to think about it.... :-) Privatemusings (talk) 06:02, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

You don't have to trust me, assume good faith or any of those things. You can check the sources I listed which outline the information that is missing from the article. That is why I provided the citations. Awadewit (talk) 06:07, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, looks like this FAR is being used for some arbcom related electioneering.[5] Ouch. PM, politics and content are just not suited and make an ugly match. Let it go. Ceoil (talk) 02:46, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

← I agree entirely that this is a beautiful article, so far as prose and style go. However, without inline citations it's impossible to verify what's been left out, what has too much weight, etc; one the greatest reasons we use inline citations is so that anyone can confirm what's being said on one particular paragraph and expand their knowledge from there... which has the benefit of editors (and readers) becoming more informed on their own whims, which in turn improves the project if they decide to edit the article. As it stands, we have nothing to measure the accuracy or neutrality of this article. Xavexgoem (talk) 16:20, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

• A few small points:
  • First sentence -- "Augustan literature is a style of English literature…". A style, which links to "literary genre"? That's surely erroneous, or at least in contradicts the rest of the lede, where the evolution of various genres are summarized. The rest of the article seems to operate on the assumption that the Augustan is a period.
  • ""Augustan" derives from George I wishing to be seen as Augustus Caesar." Ungrammatical use of the gerund "wishing". The whole paragraph seems to me to be pretty turgid. 24.57.137.218 (talk) 21:55, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concern is citations. Joelito (talk) 14:23, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

• Remove per 1b, 1c and 1d (see my comments above) Awadewit (talk) 02:09, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
• Remove per Awadewit and per my own comments above. The article's major problems remain unaddressed. —Mattisse (Talk) 03:36, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
• Remove Agree with the comments made in this section by Awadewit (talk · contribs) and Mattisse (talk · contribs), and the issues raised above. Cirt (talk) 04:02, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

• Comment Since Augustan refers to a specific type of Post-Restoration/Early Georgian type of literature (anti-government satire), and not as a genre or a time period, I believe that the only concerns would be sourcing (and possibly some image problems). Many of them have been addressed, but not all. This is easily fixed. Ottava Rima (talk) 14:06, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.