Talk:Ellen Pickering

Missing work
I've added the missing work (only 15 listed instead of the known 16) known as The Grumbler. It appears to have been released shortly before she died in 1843, but history is scant on details. It was first reviewed in January 1844. Viriditas (talk) 22:33, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Resolving the NPOV problem
After waiting a week, I have just finished reviewing the 30+ pages of sources I have received as a result of my resource request. As I originally suspected, the red flags I saw in the original DYK nomination have been confirmed. There is far too much weight given to Poovey's claims, but that is not the worst part. The worst part is that her claims are made out to be stronger than they really are. In some ways, Poovey was far more sympathetic to Pickering than we are led to believe by the current article. In any case, Poovey's primary arguments are not just controversial, contentious, and disputed, they are not really relevant. Poovey comes off as an intelligent contrarian to feminist literary history, so it's not surprising that there is some debate. However, we have to recognize this contrarian position as a minority position and give it the due weight it deserves. Poovey's paper (presented as a lecture) was poorly received by the writing community and was challenged by at least three sources. As I have stated previously, the problem is that the counterarguments to Poovey's thesis (and there are a lot of them) do not appear anywhere in this article. This gives Poovey's argument undue weight. Her opinion is neither the majority opinion nor the dominant POV; this is odd, because her opinion was presented as definitive in the DYK. It might be assumed that the original nominator was ignorant about its relative weight, but it could also be argued that the nominator was mounting an attack on feminist literary theory by presenting it as authoritative (when it wasn't). After all, who is really going to take the time and track this down? (I'm here.) Now that I've read the sources, in many ways Poovey's argument is a bit of a coatrack, as she only uses Pickering to forward her argument against feminist recovery. I will figure out how to best address this. On the other hand, the dispute raises relevant content about Pickering's writing, themes, and subjects, which should be added first. In fact, that is probably the best way to proceed. Poovey et al. can be best used in the article as sources about Pickering. That avoids the coatrack problem altogether. In many ways, the argument about canonization is a distraction, but perhaps it could be made in a different way. Viriditas (talk) 05:57, 24 April 2015 (UTC)