1PatrickMurtha
The guidelines say we can set up our own reading threads. Ah don’t tempt me…
William Harrison Ainsworth, Old Saint Paul’s: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire (1841) - It all starts with Edward Wagenknecht’s Cavalcade of the English Novel (1954 edition), which was one of my entry-points into literary history as a teen. I don’t think much of it as criticism, now (or of his parallel book on the American novel). Especially as he gets closer to his own time, Wagenknecht is hamstrung by his conservatism and his Puritanism; and he is far too canonically oriented to read ANYTHING non-canonical with perception. But for checklist purposes, the books are terrifically useful, and I have always hoped to read something by every author mentioned, a good number of whom are fairly obscure.
Two mid-19th Century historical novelists who frequently come up (and are just as frequently dismissed) as “minor” followers of Walter Scott are G.P.R. James (1799-1860) and William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882). I finally got around to reading a James novel, the entertaining and well-written Henry Smeaton, set during the reign of George I. It utterly belies his reputation as a “hack”. On finishing it, I thought I should follow up with my first Ainsworth, Old St. Paul’s (London during the tumultuous 1660s). I am a few chapters in, and enjoying it very much.
William Harrison Ainsworth, Old Saint Paul’s: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire (1841) - It all starts with Edward Wagenknecht’s Cavalcade of the English Novel (1954 edition), which was one of my entry-points into literary history as a teen. I don’t think much of it as criticism, now (or of his parallel book on the American novel). Especially as he gets closer to his own time, Wagenknecht is hamstrung by his conservatism and his Puritanism; and he is far too canonically oriented to read ANYTHING non-canonical with perception. But for checklist purposes, the books are terrifically useful, and I have always hoped to read something by every author mentioned, a good number of whom are fairly obscure.
Two mid-19th Century historical novelists who frequently come up (and are just as frequently dismissed) as “minor” followers of Walter Scott are G.P.R. James (1799-1860) and William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882). I finally got around to reading a James novel, the entertaining and well-written Henry Smeaton, set during the reign of George I. It utterly belies his reputation as a “hack”. On finishing it, I thought I should follow up with my first Ainsworth, Old St. Paul’s (London during the tumultuous 1660s). I am a few chapters in, and enjoying it very much.
2PatrickMurtha
I am currently a few chapters into Boleslaw Prus’ The Doll, a monumental novel of late 19th Century Warsaw that is considered a European classic but is probably little read outside its home country. Comparable in its social canvas to Anna Karenina, or, in Spain, Benito Pérez Galdós’ Fortunata and Jacinta and Leopoldo Alas’ La Regenta. I will report more on The Doll as I go along.
3PatrickMurtha
I am doing a complete Shakespeare project, starting with the plays that I hadn’t read before, and just finished another of those, The Winter’s Tale. An odd tragi-comic duck, with, uniquely, a long temporal gap (16 years!) between the dark first three acts and the somewhat happier last two. It would hold together in performance better than the comparable Cymbeline, which goes to pieces in the last act.
I try not to treat Shakespeare as a sacred cow, but to see what is there. This project has been illuminating. For one thing, I think that Henry VI Part One is horribly underrated - really fun play. King John, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens are all great. Troilus and Cressida is confounding and must be very difficult to stage, because it does not seem to be the same play from scene to scene. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is weak, but he was still a novice at that point; Henry VI Part One, written around the same time, is a better representative of the early work.
Next up, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and after that, Henry VI Part Two. The three Henry VI plays are really utterly distinct works, not at all like Henry IV Parts One and Two, which truly are a unit.
I try not to treat Shakespeare as a sacred cow, but to see what is there. This project has been illuminating. For one thing, I think that Henry VI Part One is horribly underrated - really fun play. King John, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens are all great. Troilus and Cressida is confounding and must be very difficult to stage, because it does not seem to be the same play from scene to scene. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is weak, but he was still a novice at that point; Henry VI Part One, written around the same time, is a better representative of the early work.
Next up, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and after that, Henry VI Part Two. The three Henry VI plays are really utterly distinct works, not at all like Henry IV Parts One and Two, which truly are a unit.
4PatrickMurtha
As part of my deep dive into American literary realism, I recently started two novels I have been meaning to get to for YEARS, both by authors with the initials HF, born only a year apart, The Cliff-Dwellers by Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929) and The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic (1856-1898).
The Frederic novel, his seventh of ten, highly regarded by Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published just two years before his premature death at 42. He had lived hard (including eight children, five by his wife and three by his mistress).
Fuller, perhaps America’s first unequivocally gay writer - he really did not try to hide it - got a late start, and lived a good deal longer. The Cliff-Dwellers was his third novel, a landmark in Chicago literature. With the Procession, his fourth and also set in Chicago, is equally well-regarded, and I will certainly read it as well.
I imagine that Fuller and Frederic must have been aware of each other, but I would like to know more about that.
More about these as I get further along.
The Frederic novel, his seventh of ten, highly regarded by Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published just two years before his premature death at 42. He had lived hard (including eight children, five by his wife and three by his mistress).
Fuller, perhaps America’s first unequivocally gay writer - he really did not try to hide it - got a late start, and lived a good deal longer. The Cliff-Dwellers was his third novel, a landmark in Chicago literature. With the Procession, his fourth and also set in Chicago, is equally well-regarded, and I will certainly read it as well.
I imagine that Fuller and Frederic must have been aware of each other, but I would like to know more about that.
More about these as I get further along.
5cindydavid4
>3 PatrickMurtha: loves labors lost is the twin of much ado about nothing esp in the main lovers
6PatrickMurtha
>5 cindydavid4: Much Ado About Nothing is a great favorite of mine.
7PatrickMurtha
Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy (published between 1939 and 1943) and John Moore’s The Brensham Trilogy (published between 1945 and 1948) bear definite similarities to each other, including a basic difficulty of categorization: Are these novels? They both have an autobiographical, lightly semi-fictional element, but each is more of a picture of a place, time, and lifestyle, and large sections read like non-fiction, not story-based at all. They are set in adjoining central English counties which share a long border: Thompson’s trilogy in Oxfordshire, Moore’s in Gloucestershire.
8cindydavid4
>6 PatrickMurtha: me too. That's what I'm to the spring in the reading through time thread. ive seen the film many times but wanted to try the original
9PatrickMurtha
>8 cindydavid4: The Joss Whedon film version, made some years later than the Branagh, is delightful. Whedon filmed it in his own house and grounds with actor friends who had been part of his own Shakespeare reading circle.
10PatrickMurtha
My friend Scott Thompson has done salutary work on behalf of female middlebrow writers at his website Furrowed Middlebrow. Yet there are male novelists who wrote this sort of book too. The Case Is Altered (1932) by William Plomer (1903-1979), a London boarding house novel, is an excellent example.
Plomer was born in South Africa to English parents, and was active in the South African literary scene in his early twenties; his first and most celebrated novel, Turbott Wolfe (1925), scandalized that country with its positive account of inter-racial romance.
After a few years in Japan, Plomer spent all the rest of his life in England, where he was friendly with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and many other prominent figures in British cultural life. He was an editor for Ian Fleming and a librettist for Benjamin Britten. His literary criticism is excellent (Electric delights).
For a man with impeccable “highbrow” connections, The Case Is Altered reads perfectly as a middlebrow novel, with an emphasis on character and social class, and a shifting Altman-esque focus among the residents of the boarding house. It has some real bite, and felt rather timely to me, with domestic terror and homosexuality among its themes (Plomer was gay himself). A good read altogether.
Plomer was born in South Africa to English parents, and was active in the South African literary scene in his early twenties; his first and most celebrated novel, Turbott Wolfe (1925), scandalized that country with its positive account of inter-racial romance.
After a few years in Japan, Plomer spent all the rest of his life in England, where he was friendly with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and many other prominent figures in British cultural life. He was an editor for Ian Fleming and a librettist for Benjamin Britten. His literary criticism is excellent (Electric delights).
For a man with impeccable “highbrow” connections, The Case Is Altered reads perfectly as a middlebrow novel, with an emphasis on character and social class, and a shifting Altman-esque focus among the residents of the boarding house. It has some real bite, and felt rather timely to me, with domestic terror and homosexuality among its themes (Plomer was gay himself). A good read altogether.
11PatrickMurtha
As part of my ongoing engagement with Nevada history, I just started Richard G. Lillard’s Desert Challenge: An Interpretation of Nevada, first published in 1942. I like the description on the front of the dust jacket of the 1949 second edition: “Neither a formal history nor a tourist guide, this book is a richly documented interpretation of the rise of a unique state under the peculiar conditions of the sagebrush desert.” The opening pages are very well written, and I am looking forward to the rest.
12PatrickMurtha
I am reading one of James Fenimore Cooper’s lesser-known novels at the moment, Lionel Lincoln. It does not have much of a reputation, but I am really enjoying it. Set in Revolutionary War Massachusetts, it was intended to be the first of a series coveting each of the 13 colonies during that conflict, but Cooper never got further with the idea.
Cooper interestingly makes his hero a Boston-born Tory with a conscience, who is not entirely out of sympathy with the rebellious Americans. The novel is dialogue-driven, without the long descriptive passages of other Cooper novels, and thus reads much faster than those. The plot is well-managed. Altogether a nice read which I am happy to point people to, because I do not think it has much of a fan base.
Cooper interestingly makes his hero a Boston-born Tory with a conscience, who is not entirely out of sympathy with the rebellious Americans. The novel is dialogue-driven, without the long descriptive passages of other Cooper novels, and thus reads much faster than those. The plot is well-managed. Altogether a nice read which I am happy to point people to, because I do not think it has much of a fan base.
13PatrickMurtha
I am very partial to pre-1820 American literature, undoubtedly because I studied it, and can read all of it with pleasure.
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is a writer who has interested me ever since I first encountered his work in American literature classes in college. At that time I read Wieland and Ormond; recently I re-read Wieland, along with its unfinished companion text Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, in the Penguin edition. Now I have started on Arthur Mervyn; Edgar Huntly (also issued by Penguin) rounds out the set of CBB’s four key Gothic novels, although these are hardly his entire work.
Brown’s novels are by no means cookie-cutter Gothic, but represent interesting spins on the genre, incorporating such manifestations as ventriloquism (Wieland), sleep-walking (Edgar Huntly), and disease (Arthur Mervyn - the actual Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793). All of these Gothic novels are set in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania, so Brown was a regionalist as well. He was a forward-looking individual, an abolitionist and a feminist (this is reflected in his philosophical dialogue Alcuin), and was involved in many reform efforts up until his early death of tuberculosis at age 39. There is no telling what more he might have accomplished had he lived longer.
The Library of America published three of Brown’s Gothics in one volume (minus the long Arthur Mervyn, which originally appeared in two volumes a year apart). But the Delphi e-book omnibus contains just about everything he wrote, at their usual low price.
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is a writer who has interested me ever since I first encountered his work in American literature classes in college. At that time I read Wieland and Ormond; recently I re-read Wieland, along with its unfinished companion text Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, in the Penguin edition. Now I have started on Arthur Mervyn; Edgar Huntly (also issued by Penguin) rounds out the set of CBB’s four key Gothic novels, although these are hardly his entire work.
Brown’s novels are by no means cookie-cutter Gothic, but represent interesting spins on the genre, incorporating such manifestations as ventriloquism (Wieland), sleep-walking (Edgar Huntly), and disease (Arthur Mervyn - the actual Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793). All of these Gothic novels are set in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania, so Brown was a regionalist as well. He was a forward-looking individual, an abolitionist and a feminist (this is reflected in his philosophical dialogue Alcuin), and was involved in many reform efforts up until his early death of tuberculosis at age 39. There is no telling what more he might have accomplished had he lived longer.
The Library of America published three of Brown’s Gothics in one volume (minus the long Arthur Mervyn, which originally appeared in two volumes a year apart). But the Delphi e-book omnibus contains just about everything he wrote, at their usual low price.
14PatrickMurtha
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15PatrickMurtha
T.S. Stribling’s The Forge (1931), the first in his Vaiden Trilogy, deserves far more of a reputation as one of the best Civil War novels. It centers on the Vaidens, slave-owning but far from rich, and other families in northern Alabama as they are involved in and react to the war and its aftermath. The slave and Union points of view are not neglected either. The Forge is frequently VERY funny, a quite unexpected and welcome characteristic in a Civil War novel.
The second Vaiden novel, The Store, which takes place in the 1880s, won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The third, Unfinished Cathedral, skips ahead to the 1920s. Faulkner bought and read these as they appeared, and there is an obvious affinity with / influence on his own Snopes Trilogy.
The second Vaiden novel, The Store, which takes place in the 1880s, won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The third, Unfinished Cathedral, skips ahead to the 1920s. Faulkner bought and read these as they appeared, and there is an obvious affinity with / influence on his own Snopes Trilogy.
