How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
In 1986 he was twenty-nine, a graduate of Prince Albert College, London (1978) and a PhD of the same university (1985). His doctoral dissertation was entitled History, Historians and Poetry? A Study of the Presentation of Historical 'Evidence' in the Poems of Randolph Henry Ash. He had written it under the supervision of James Blackadder, which had been a discouraging experience. Blackadder was discouraged and liked to discourage others. (2.3)
Roland Mitchell's experience as a graduate student wasn't particularly pleasant (although who has a pleasant experience as a graduate student?), but once we readers learn a little bit more about the experiences of his senior colleagues, his experience doesn't seem so bad by comparison.
Quote #2
He made applications and was regularly turned down. When one came up in his own department there were 600 applications. Roland was interviewed, out of courtesy he decided, but the job went to Fergus Wolff, whose track record was less consistent, who could be brilliant or bathetic, but never dull and right, who was loved by his teachers whom he exasperated and entranced, where Roland excited no emotion more passionate than solid approbation. Fergus was also in the right field, which was literary theory. (2.13)
This passage suggests that as scholarly fashions burst in and fade out of existence, there's a risk that alternative methodologies, practices, and perspectives will be overlooked or ignored. Then again, characters like Maud Bailey and Leonora Stern would argue that the status quo can be just as exclusionary.
Quote #3
Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarök. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F.R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. (3.15)
As we learn, James Blackadder's undergraduate experience was just as discouraging as Roland Mitchell's graduate experience. Any hopes that he once had of being a poet were quickly stamped out when he imagined what F. R. Leavis would say about them.