Done

"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well

It were done quickly"

Macbeth Act 1, scene 7, lines 1-2

I just hit send on sending my book manuscript to my editor.
And I think I'm going to throw up.

I am immensely proud of the work. I think it is a great new voice in scholarship, and I think it does important work. It is a longue duree approach to the political English devil. It crosses genres and periodization. It applies folklore scholarship in how I analyze the devil as a vehicle for historical concerns.

But I still think I'm going to throw up.

Because I have heard a voice in my head all week as I typed up and did last looks.
And the voice said...

It said I was a high school teacher, not a professor.
It said I wasn't good enough to get hired at a university, so I certainly wasn't good enough to get a book published.
It said that I may have gotten a contract, but the peer reviewers were going to trash it so badly that it would be dead in the water.
It said this book will never be published.

It whispered then shouted that I, and this work, was trash.

I mean, everything associated with academia has told me, again and again...

This is not a new feeling for me. I felt this when I was working on my MA, as other people in my program looked down at me. I felt this when I was rejected from PhD programs. I felt this as I struggled with the first dissertation rejected, and I tried to find my voice again.

I don't know if everyone feels like this on submitting their first book manuscript.
Maybe it's just because I feel so disconnected from academia, that community, that support.
I mean, I don't know what happens next. I know it goes to peer reviewers, but after that? No clue.
How likely is it they hate it?
How likely is it they tell my editor it's trash and to throw it out?
I have to imagine that happens, right? Just like articles?
Or is the emphasis more on fixing, notes?

I don't know.
I know that I immediately worried I'd messed up an Ibid citation, made a weak argument. Cut the wrong thing. That my approach will be dismissed as too fringe, too out there.
My brain has no problem coming up with all the ways the work, and I, am a failure.

I also know that with no higher ed job prospects on the horizon, with me most likely continuing my life as a high school teacher, the worst case scenario of the book sucking and never getting published are absolute nil.
My students, admin, school do not care if the book is published.
My advancement does not depend on it.

I reworked my conclusion to be less timely-specific to modern day politics, and to present more a big picture look about how even after the early modern period, we continue to demonize political enemies in a variety of cartoons.
Again and again the same visual and written rhetoric that marks the devil as threat and a danger in medieval and early modern texts is recycled and revised in a variety of political cartoons.

Devils could topple monarchs.

Devils were associated with rebels, the ideas of revolt, countering authority.

They represented fears over granting equal rights to Blacks, historically constructed as devils.

Women, for the ways they sought authority they weren't entitled to were constructed as demonic. Here, Mrs. Satan ensures the entire women's suffrage movement was demonized.

The same demonic rhetoric appears now, demonizing some so that others can define themselves in opposition to the devil figure.

We continue to construct people, often ethnically and culturally different people, as threats, dangers, and therefore demonic.

It's good and fun stuff.
By far my favorite political devil cartoon is the one below.
It's not medieval. It's not early modern. It's not English.
But it conveys in one image the modern-day work my work leads to.

And I am proud of it, no matters what happens.

So, with pride, and trepidation for the future, I present to you The Political Devil in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature...

For the first time in five and a half years, I am done.
I know there is work to do, the author instructions suggest to start working on the index. I have two pamphlet covers I need to get image permissions for (no idea how to do that, chalk that up to something else they don't teach you in grad school).

But I am done.
For the first time in a very, very long time, I do not have a single academic project I'm working on. I have nothing to fill weekends with. Nothing.
For all intents and purposes, when I return to my high school teaching job tomorrow, I just have that job to do.
It feels a bit like when I finished the dissertation, defended, then graduated. A bit anti-climatic. A little surprised it's not a bigger deal.
And tired. Very, very tired.

So I will rest. I will focus on my job.
And I will try as hard as I can to take that voice, shove them into a dark room, close the door, and pretend they don't exist.