Monday News: YA diversity & the “problem book,” Spider-Man deal with Marvel & Sony, Masters & Johnson, and Polidori’s Vampyre

JanetPublishing Newsdiversity / History / literature / Marvel / problem book / science / sexuality / Sony / Spider-Man / vampires / YA4 Comments

“SO MANY (TOO MANY?) ISSUES”: PERCEPTIONS OF DIVERSITY IN BOOK REVIEWS, PART 2 – A very interesting and compelling post on the portrayal of minority identities in YA, specifically in terms of diverse YA novels being tagged as “issue” or “problem” books, especially in a reviewing environment where many or most reviewers inhabit a majority identity and perspective. As Lo suggests, this may in part have to do with unfamiliarity, but it can disadvantage books that portray more complex and nuanced perspectives on diversity, especially since the “problem novel” label can unfairly communicate the story is secondary to some sort of “agenda.”

I don’t have any definitive proof that there’s an invisible ceiling on the number of issues a YA novel can contain, but reviews such as those above do police the boundaries of what is acceptable in a realistic YA novel. I have talked to many authors who feel that this invisible ceiling does exist; it is basically common knowledge among minority authors that including more than one minority identity in a book is a huge risk for your career.

In the real world, plenty of individuals deal with more than one minority identity at the same time, every day. Obviously a novel is not reality — often, reality is too unbelievable for fiction — but YA fiction that seeks to deal with real-world experiences must be able to address the lives of teens who check more than one minority box. –Diversity in YA

Spider-Man: How Sony, Marvel Will Benefit from Unique Deal (EXCLUSIVE) – I’ve been meaning to post this story for a few days, as there had been much anticipation around the possibility that Spider-Man would be returning to the Marvel universe, which he is, but not under the circumstances some had anticipated (that Marvel would buy the rights back from Sony). The deal they cut will allow both Marvel and Sony to use Spider-Man in a deal that’s beneficial to both. The lack of drama around the actual deal is kind of surprising, and it will be interesting to see if the partnership can bring Spider-Man back to his former glory.

Marvel has long wanted to put Spider-Man in its movies, but since Sony Pictures controlled the rights to the character since 1999, the web-slinger has been off limits. Making a crossover could have been costly, since Disney would have been expected to shell out millions. But the actual deal turns out to much cheaper — more like free.

Marvel Studios won’t pay Sony Pictures for the rights to put Spider-Man in “Captain America: Civil War,” the “Avengers” franchise or its other superhero films, as part of its new partnership with the studio, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. At the same time, Marvel won’t receive a cut of the box office for any of Sony’s films that feature Spider-Man. Sony won’t receive a percentage of the revenue Disney makes from Marvel’s films that have Spider-Man, either. –Variety

Masters & Johnson: They wrote the book on having sex – With all the sensationalism around the 50 Shades movie (and the discussions we all need to be having around why sex still scandalizes so much more than violence), this short but pithy piece on the research of Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson, which was noteworthy for a number of reasons. One, because Masters pushed Johnson to have sex with him as part of the research process; two, because he left his wife for her and then married her (only to divorce her for another woman 20+ years later); and three, because Masters tried to ‘prove’ his horrible belief that “that people could be converted from homosexuality to heterosexuality.” This work was unsound and bigoted, but their earlier work was important and groundbreaking in a number of ways.

Thomas Maier, who wrote a biography of Masters and Johnson (called “Masters of Sex”), said the couple dealt with virtually every aspect of human sexuality.

“Instead of the male being the more powerful of the sexes, what they were clinically showing was that women actually had a greater capacity for sex,” said Maier. . . .

Then, the prevailing success rate treating sexual problems: maybe 15 percent.

They reported an astonishing 80 percent.

The best part: The treatment only took just two weeks.

“Essentially what they did was they taught couples how to touch one another again, literally how to communicate physically, where it had broken down,” said Maier. –CBS News

The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire – Even if you are familiar with the relationship between Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and physician John Polidori, and the storytelling competition that resulted in both Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, a book that was later credited to Byron and that created the image of vampires as “the elegant and magnetic denizens of cosmopolitan assemblies and polite drawing rooms,” this is a nice little essay on the relationship between Byron and Polidori that may have inspired the book. Polidori, Byron’s physician and traveling companion, had a pretty competitive relationship with the poet, and suffered a good deal of humiliation from the dramatic Lord Byron. Andrew McConnell Stott traces the relationship and the way in which it may have inspired Polidori’s story.

Knowing the context of Polidori’s story, it is hard not to read “The Vampyre” as an allegory of the doctor’s relationship with Byron, a text that is seamed with the mocking laughter of a man possessed of the power to debilitate through the force of personality alone. Furthermore, it rewrites the well-known story of Byron’s success since the publication of Childe Harold, wherein a young nobleman goes abroad and returns filled with capacious understanding of himself and the world, by showing that his melancholy air is a deceit, a mendacious con perpetuated on a gullible claque of fools for the purpose of their exploitation. As a meditation on the degeneracy of a society that has encouraged the excesses of celebrity to such an extent that it has been allowed to dwarf the higher values and enable the abuse of the virtuous and the innocent, it damns absolutely the superficial lure of fame. –Public Domain Review

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

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