Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities by Lise Jaillant (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities by Lise Jaillant Naomi Booth (bio) Lise Jaillant. Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities. Oxford UP, 2022. Pp. xii, 270. £30. In The Programme Era (2009), Mark McGurl famously argues that the rise of the creative writing programme is "the most important event in post-war American literary history" (ix). McGurl's study has influenced valuable new work on the discipline of creative writing—including Eric Bennett's Workshops of Empire (2015) and David O. Dowling's A Delicate Aggression (2019). But much of this work, Lise Jaillant argues, has been "strikingly US-centric. … Creative writing programmes in the rest of the world have been largely ignored" (8). Jaillant's Literary Rebels proposes to widen the field with a "transatlantic perspective, focusing on British creative writers in relation to their American counterparts" (8). Her approach is inspired by "book history 'from below'": "Rather than a macro-history of creative writing programmes, this monograph seeks to recover the voices of writers associated with these programmes" (9). Literary Rebels is thus a series of fascinating case studies divided into two main sections, one focussing on American writers and one on British writers. Jaillant tracks specific "micro" developments in creative writing against cultural and political currents, such as changing ideas of patronage, Cold War suspicions of communal activity, Pierre Bourdieu's theorisation of the field of cultural production, the "ideology of the natural-born creator" (225), and a rise in "radical individualism" (16; emphasis in original). Jaillant begins her study with Paul Engle. While Engle claimed to have founded the discipline of creative writing with his introduction of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936, Jaillant reminds readers that creative writing had in fact been taught in different forms in the United States since the late nineteenth century. This is one example of how she exposes the self-mythologising of creative writing's pioneers throughout the book. Jaillant argues for the modernist roots of creative writing at Iowa: Engle, she claims, like the New Critics, "tried to combine a university post with a radical criticism of universities" (23). Engle is one of many figures whom Jaillant analyses to demonstrate the ambivalent—and often antagonistic—relationship between creative writers and academia, and the "'mobilization and deployment of hostility' central to key movements in English studies" (14). We are also treated in this section to the salutary tale of James Culpeper—an aspiring writer who aggressively tried to convince William Faulkner to End Page 135 mentor him, causing Faulkner to fear that he might need police protection. Jaillant uses this case to demonstrate that, before the "programme era," writers depended on what she terms "the informal mentorship model" (15; emphasis in original): a new writer needed to persuade an established writer to "consecrate" (Bourdieu's term) and promote them (Jaillant 43). Jaillant reminds us of the pitfalls of this longstanding model. Faulkner, for instance, had benefitted from informal mentorship; he generally refused to mentor younger writers in turn but made an exception for a young woman, Joan Williams, with whom he hoped to start a "love affair" (55). Jaillant references the Culpeper-Faulkner debacle to exemplify "a key moment in the history of the literary field: the moment when the informal mentorship model was … challenged by the model of university education and affiliation" (15). Jaillant's first United Kingdom case study is Malcolm Bradbury, who established creative writing at the University of East Anglia: "Being based in Norwich, … Bradbury was able to replicate what Paul Engle had done at Iowa: to create a literary powerhouse outside a traditional centre" (16). Jaillant argues "that creative writing in Britain was, from the start, positioned as an outsider's discipline" (16); Bradbury was hostile towards the London and Oxbridge establishments but interested in the "literary institutions and material conditions that allow artistic creation" (132). Jaillant also highlights the contradictions in Bradbury's approach. He stood against literary nepotism but arguably spawned a new kind of clique (the UEA "mafia" 240, which was often accused of cronyism); he became a "literary insider precisely by touting his status as outsider" (4). Jaillant...