Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/The Green Child/archive1

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

The article was promoted by SandyGeorgia 02:26, 7 February 2010 [1].

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The Green Child

Nominator(s): Malleus Fatuorum 01:13, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• Featured article candidates/The Green Child/archive1

I bring this little article here with a great deal of trepidation. It's on a fairly short novel, the only one written by Herbert Read, but I'm about as far away from an expert on English literature as it's possible to get. I came across this book half a lifetime ago, and it's fascinated me ever since, so I wanted to at least try and do some justice to it and perhaps bring it to a wider audience. I couldn't have even got close to this effort without the help, advice, and support in particular of Awadewit, Moni3, and Ealdgyth, who all have my sincere thanks. Any shortcomings, errors, omissions, or downright misunderstandings are of course down to me though, not them. Malleus Fatuorum 01:13, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• Technical comments (might do a full review later)
  • No dab links.
  • No dead external links; links requiring subscription are labeled as such.
  • First image (cover) needs alt text. Good now, thanks! Ucucha 02:04, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
  • This image is fair use; the fair use rationale is standard and persuasive.
  • Second image confirmed as CC-BY-SA-2.0 (released by photographer on external site)
• Ucucha 01:25, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• Thanks. I've added alt text to the first image. --Malleus Fatuorum 01:57, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

SupportComments: Very interesting indeed. However, the "autobiographical" section gives us virtually no information about Read, who he was, etc. Some information about his background and his place in the literary world is necessary. The Critical reception looks thin; the first sentence ought to be attributed, and the Eliot quote merely repeats what you've already said in the lead. Can this section be expanded – I would have expected a greater range of critical comment for a book that has run to several editions over sixty years? In general, punctuation needs tidying here and there, but that's not a major issue. Brianboulton (talk) 11:23, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

All concerns addressed. Happy to support. Brianboulton (talk) 09:22, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Replies

• Thanks Brian. The Autobiographical section is intended to draw out the autobiographical elements encountered in the novel, not to be a precis of Read's life or place in the literary world. Herbert Read has his own article, of course, so what I've tried to do here is to concentrate on those biographical details that provide insight into the novel, not the novelist. I've expanded a little on the "state of flux" mentioned in the Biographical background ... section, for instance, to explain the switch in his political idealogy from communism to anarchism. On reflection that may be worth expanding on just a little more in the Autobiographical section ... in any event, I want to avoid adding detail that doesn't help to explain the book.
  • My mistake, I meant my comment to relate to the "biographical", not the "autobiographical" section. My feeling was that, although as you say this article is not about Read, it would be useful for readers of this article to know just a little more of him, and I think you have now done that. Brianboulton (talk) 16:42, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• The first sentence of Critical reception is already attributed, or am I misunderstanding you?
  • It is cited but not attributed as, for example, the Eliot quote is. We need to know whose wording you are quoting. Brianboulton (talk) 16:42, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
    • Ah, understood now and attributed. --Malleus Fatuorum 19:40, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• I'll see if I can dredge up any more reviews, but that's about all I've managed to track down so far.
  • Can you also try to expand the Eliot comment? Brianboulton (talk) 16:42, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
    • On further investigation it appears that Eliot may have been making a general comment about Read's writing, not about this novel specifically, so I've removed it. I've added a quotation from historian David Goodway, which suggests that there may not be much more critical material to find: "[Read's] remarkable career and formidable output have generated a surprisingly limited biographical and critical literature", but I'll keep looking. --Malleus Fatuorum 19:40, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• What kind of problems do you see with the punctuation?
  • Couple of examples: "Professor of English, Richard Wasson,..." - comma after "English" is superfluous; "The Green Child, is "highly regarded and widely debated": again, superfluous comma (after "Child"). Suggest you check for similar others. Brianboulton (talk) 16:42, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
    • OK. I've had another look through with my comma-pruning shears. --Malleus Fatuorum 22:43, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

--Malleus Fatuorum 15:26, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• Support (Note: I offered some comments on this article back in October.) This article is well-written and comprehensive. There is not that much scholarship published on The Green Child, unfortunately, so we have to make do with the scraps available. :) The psychoanalytic material is very challenging to explain to a lay audience and I think this article does so well. Awadewit (talk) 22:28, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• Thanks very much for looking it over Awadewit, for your support, and most of all for the help you so generously offered last year. You really ought to be a conominator, I think, as I couldn't have written anything like this without your assistance. This is a book I've loved for years, but I must admit I didn't fully understand it until I started on this article, and I'm not convinced that I do even now. Hopefully my enthusiasm for it comes through and may even encourage others to read it, with a bit more understanding than I did when I first came across it. --Malleus Fatuorum 22:39, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• You're welcome - seeing more high-quality literature articles on Wikipedia is my raison d'etre in editing, so I'm happy to help out. I think your interest in the book does come through. I've just checked it out from the library. :) Awadewit (talk) 22:54, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Support. Well-written, good structure, appears to be carefully researched and appropriately referenced. I struggled a little with part of the 'genre and style' section, but happy with the article overall. My specific queries:

• The sentence "In the manuscript, the final part of the story..." seems to interrupt the explanation being offered to the reader about how Plato's Phaedo is reflected in the novel. Particularly if, like me, one knows nothing about the Phaedo, the preceding sentence has set the reader up for an explanantion of what the similarities are, only to be briefly derailed by what i suggest should be a footbnote to the text, regarding the allusion to Plato's work that was lost in transition from manuscript to published book. If you drop that sentence to a footnote, i think it flows much better.
• In the following sentence the word "however" appears too late for it to scan well: "Read was "almost certainly" influenced in his depiction of the world of the Green people by W. H. Hudson's 1887 utopian novel A Crystal Age however, a story in which people strive to "live above their own mortality"." If I have understood your intention correctly, then it would be better written as "Read however was "almost certainly"..."

Otherwise excellent and most interesting. hamiltonstone (talk) 01:58, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Reply

• Thanks. Both your comments make sense to me and I've made those changes. --Malleus Fatuorum 02:21, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Support I've never heard of this book, let alone read it, but if it reads as well as the article, it might be worth a shot Jimfbleak - talk to me? 07:54, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

• Thanks Jim. It's quite a short book, and the three parts are almpst entirely separate, so it can be read quite quickly. There's some beautiful phrasing in it; this made a particular impression on me all those years ago: "words and things grow together in the mind, grow like a skin over the tender images of things until words and things cannot be separated". --Malleus Fatuorum 15:20, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

• Comments - sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:52, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

• Support This article is well-written and flows beautifully. Just a couple of quick nitpicks: first, footnote 11 is the only footnote to end with a period - was that intentional? Second, the last bibliography entry has the Goodman book title as Herbert Reassessed, while all other entries have it as Herbert Read reassessed. Nikkimaria (talk) 19:50, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

• Thanks. "Reassessed" is correct, the others were just carelessness on my part, now fixed. So far as footnote #11 is concerned, that's the way that the {{Template:Inflation-fn}} works. I'll float the idea of adding a "postscript" parameter to make the period optional on the template's talk page. --Malleus Fatuorum 20:08, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

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