The Things you Can Learn in a Book Review

Such a shame 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, I guess my instincts about the Fox book (see my last post) were pretty good.  We have to have at least two book reviews on our bibliography, so after I finished writing about Class Fictions, I went searching for a review.  I was kind of surprised at how many there were, because I only found a couple for my other books.  

It seems that Pamela Fox got a lot of people going besides me, although the others are mostly concerned with the book overall rather than her take on shame theory.  I read a review by Neil Nehring that was in Studies in the Novel in 1998.  Nehring is a cultural studies scholar, not a shame guy, and he found a lot of things in Fox's book to disagree with other than her use of shame.  What I got out of reading his review and my examination of the book is that Fox seems to be just generalizing about shame and assuming that her working-class writers feel it as sort of an ongoing embarrassment about lacking middle- or upper-class advantages.  My final take on it is that she hasn't got enough to go on in terms of a shame approach, so whatever she comes up with from the books she is analyzing is bound to be kind of superficial.  Of course, I don't know that much about it myself -- yet-- but that's my impression.

Related articles

• Is modern society making us feel ASHAMED? Pressure to be successful causes us to hide failure and humiliation (dailymail.co.uk)
• Self Worth can be Destroyed by Telling Someone 'Shame on You' (medindia.net)