Story Telling 2

August 16, 2024: this page is no longer updated. "Storytelling" is now updated here. 

 June 21, 2024 -- note to reader: I have two pages on this literature blog that are almost identical -- "Story Telling 1" and "Story Telling 2." I've long forgotten which one I update most often. Both still need editing and formatting. I think I had personal notes on one of the two pages and for that reason posted a second identical page at the time, but deleted "personal notes." Now, I really don't know which one to recommend. As a reference, one might want to check both, using "word find."

Original Note, undated.

AKA "Chapter 24." This was original "Chapter 24" among my word documents in my diary folder.

Upon transcribing, the original links and bookmarks no longer work, but perhaps over time, I will correct that. 

The bulk of this original material was written during my voracious reading period which I believe began around 2000 and lasted until 2007. 

In 2000 I was transitioning from commanding one of the largest USAF hospitals in the world for a headquarters job in San Antonio, TX. I officially retired in 2007 but for all intents and purposes, I had retired in 2000. "9/11" was in 2002 and shortly thereafter I met a number of wonderful colleagues when on temporary duty to Menwith Hill Station, Yorkshire, England, between 2002 and 2004. 

This was originally meant for me to keep track of things (I have a lousy memory) but it appears that Laura may use it when home-schooling her two sons, Judah and Levi.

Chapter 24:  Storytelling

ENGLISH LITERATURE

The major periods:

• The Beginnings to 1500
• The Renaissance
• The Seventeenth Century
• The Eighteenth Century
• The Romantic Period
• The Pre-Raphaelites: the last phase of the Romantic Period; transitioned to
• "The Great Pause"  -- a relatively recent term; most folks will not have heard of this term.
  
• Victorian
• The Victorian Period (1830 – 1901)
• The Georgian Period (1911 – 1936)

Belle Époque: the “classical” belle époque was the period between 1875 and 1914 in Europe and the United States; in hindsight it has been called the “Gilded Age.”

In his history of the Jews, Howard M. Sachar refers to the years after WWII as another belle époque.

INDEX

(Note:  much of the history of writing below was taken directly from the web.  Do not copy it for publication or school papers; it will easily be identified as plagiarism.)

Personal Thoughts
        Chet Raymo: Catholic Agnostic

Authors (those that have interested me)

• Overview
• The Brontës
• Jane Austen
• George Eliot
• Ernest Hemingway
• Eugene O’Neill
• Hunter S. Thompson
• Ovid
• T.S. Eliot
• The Romanticists
• Woolf 
• Willa Cather
• Edith Wharton

    Definitions, Writing, Concepts

    Genres   

• Epic Sagas, Oral
• Mythology
• Epic Sagas, Written
• Novella
• English Poetry
• Drama       
• The Novel
• The Realistic Novel

    Seventeenth Century

• The Novel
• Daniel Defoe
• The Realistic Novel

    Nineteenth Century

• Pre-Raphaelites
• Pre-Victorian
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Victorian Literature
• The French and Russian Novel
• The Gothic Novel
• Romanticism
• The American Novel
• Exile Literature
• Fin de Siècle        
• Decadence, Artifice and Aesthetics

 Twentieth Century

• The Modernists
• The English Novel
• The American Novel
• American Writers
• The French Novel
• The Russian Novel
• The Mystery Novel
• Naturalism (Emile Zola)
•  Kafka
• Graphic Novels
• Gonzo (Hunter S Thompson)
  
• Miscellaneous

Poetry:  definition

Miscellaneous

• English Eras
• Lists
• Essays and Other Rambling Thoughts
• Books in Apartment
• Trivia – Connecting the Dots

Personal Thoughts

May 30, 2021: first started updating with personal thoughts, this date.

December 25, 2015: somewhere I wrote this progression — I called it something like “passing the baton.” I can’t find it now and can’t remember all the authors, but hopefully I can either re-accomplish it or find it. 

For now:

Defoe —> Robert Louis Stevenson —> Joseph Conrad —> Graham Green —> Ernest Hemingway —> Hunter S. Thompson

From wiki: 

    

Stevenson was seen for much of the 20th century as a second-class writer. He became relegated to children's literature and horror genres, condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf (daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen) and her husband Leonard Woolf, and he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached its nadir in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature where he was entirely unmentioned, and The Norton Anthology of English Literature and excluded him from 1968 to 2000 (1st–7th editions), including him only in the 8th edition (2006).    

The late 20th century brought a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands and a humanist. He was praised by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of "literary skill or sheer imaginative power" and a pioneer of the Age of the Story Tellers along with H. Rider Haggard.  He is now evaluated as a peer of authors such as Joseph Conrad(whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas fiction) and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organisations devoted to  him. Throughout the vicissitudes of his scholarly reception, Stevenson has remained popular worldwide. According to the Index Translationum, Stevenson is ranked the 26th-most-translated author in the world, ahead of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.

July 10, 2019:

Jane Eyre: A Portrait of a Life, Twayne's Masterwork Studies, Maggie Berg, c. 1987. Wow, what an incredible book/explanation/background of Charlotte Brontë, England at the time, and her autobiography, Jane Eyre.

March 9, 2019: 

Something I had never heard before — “The Great Pause.” Between the end of the Romantic Period and the beginning of the Victoria Period, there seems to be a void. Lucasta Miller refers to it as “The Great Pause.” Her second book, the biography of L.E.L. helps fill in that gap. Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Lucasta Miller’s first book was a biography of the Brontës — her thesis in that book: Elizabeth Gaskell and the eldest Brontë conspired to develop the myth of the Brontës. The great Romanticists: “shelleybyronandkeats” and the first Victorian of note, Charles Dickens. I’ve now added a small section in the body of “storytelling” below to include this phase.

January 14, 2019: 

I continue to read and I continue to take notes, but most of them are now on “literature” blog. It’s too bad a lot of this will be lost when I did, but I doubt the three grandchildren would have much time for my writings.

February 27, 2018: 

It’s too bad the internet came along. LOL. Because of the internet, I spend much more time “surfing” than I do serious reading. And, unfortunately, I no longer, for the most part, keep journals. I update my blog — including a literature blog. But my writings are strewn all over the place. Today, I am reading Katherine Frank’s biography of “Crusoe” and Daniel Defoe, c. 2004.

November 12, 2017: two days ago I visited the library at a local community college, the Tarrant County Community College. I was struck by the number of books devoted to Shakespeare. Interestingly enough, it appeared the section on literary authors was not alphabetical, but somewhat chronological. It was interesting that after all the shelves on Shakespeare, the next author that appeared was DeFoe.

November 12, 2017: I do a lot of reading, although I have slowed down a lot since I started blogging about the Bakken. In all the reading I have done, I had never come upon “naturalism” or “realism” until I read Gilberto Perez’s essay (p. 445) in New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Today, I added a section on “naturalism” and “realism” but then it appears I already had a section on naturalism. I added my “new” comments on naturalism to the “Naturalism” section. Briefly, it appears naturalism followed (or was a reaction to) Romanticism. Realism grew out of naturalism, and one might argue that dystopian literature naturally followed realism.

May 16, 2017: I look at all the books I’ve read since I began my “reading program” in 2004. It is quite impressive. Looking at the list of books I’ve bought over the years is a diary in itself, reminding me what I was interested in at the time.

I’m listening to Leonard Cohen now and missing Pat immensely.

December 25, 2015: somewhere I wrote this progression — I called it something “passing the baton.” I can’t find it now and can’t remember all the authors, but hopefully I can either re-accomplish it or find it. 

For now:

    Defoe —> Robert Louis Stevenson —> Joseph Conrad —> Graham Green —> Ernest Hemingway —> Hunter S. Thompson.

December 25, 2015: our small apartment was becoming cluttered with way too many books. A few weeks ago I put a large percentage of books in storage (a storage closet on the patio of the apartment) keeping only the books I thought I would be interested in this next year or so. I am hoping that a year from now, I can go through storage, and throw away a large number of books I will probably never look at again. One book I kept back was a “throwaway,” American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever, c. 2006. It was a very short book; the chapters were also very short. It was the story of the Concord, MA, transcendentalists. It was really quite good; a nice overview of that time and place. It got me interested (again) in the subject, so I re-read a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne by James R. Mellow. It was the worst biography I have ever read. The writing was bad; there were errors; and, the subject of the biography wasn’t particularly interesting to begin with. I slogged through, mostly skimming through the chapters. However, I followed that with Megan Marshall’s The Peabody Sisters, c. 2005, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It was incredibly interesting; a real pleasure to read. It would be a good book for someone like Arianna to read when she is in her mid-teens. By the time she is in her late teens it might be too late for her to absorb some of the lessons learned by Elizabeth Peabody about the issues facing a young woman coming of age.

January 20, 2015: I continue to read but not the “same way” I read when I began this project. I think the scaffolding has been completed in this word document. Now I add to it. I won’t subtract stuff, except through editing to correct errors, but I will add items and they may not be updated in the body of the document.

November 17, 2012: wow, three years since I have updated personal thoughts regarding my reading program. My handwritten journals have been kept up to date.  I wish I had someone to share my reading with. May and I are on totally different wavelengths. I don’t know if she knows how far our paths have parted. Our only common interest: Arianna and Olivia. Right now I am in my Cape Cod phase. It started with books on whaling, probably because that was a subject I enjoyed with Arianna. May and I have taken several overnight trips to Provincetown, Cape Cod, and that is clearly our favorite getaway at the present time. I long to be in Provincetown every weekend, but obviously that won’t happen, but we go as often as we can. We should have been there this weekend, but Kiri and Josh wanted us to babysit the girls tonight (Saturday). It appears they changed their minds and we could have been in Provincetown; I’m not happy. When I am not happy in the evening I ride to the Upper Crust for pizza and beer – until this past week. They abruptly closed due to bankruptcy. Tonight I am in the neighborhood Starbuck’s because no other place to go. I am reading Moby Dick, and two or three other books on Cape Cod, whaling, and/or Provincetown, Cape Cod.

November 11, 2009:

    A couple weeks ago I deleted my blog (see July 5, 2009, entry) and thus all the stuff I recorded regarding my reading program has been lost. I will come back here to record my reading program.

    I am currently reading a) a biography of Anaïs Nin, by Bair; b) a biography of Virginia Woolf; and, c) Adam Bede by George Eliot. The latter is the most boring book I have ever read but I am slogging through it. It droned on and on and then all of a sudden got very interesting with a real plot about 2/3rds of the way through. Now I am finally enjoying it.

    I forgot the plot of Ethan Frome (see July 5, 2009) so I had to quickly re-read it; then I remembered the plot; it’s actually a pretty good book. They say Edith Wharton had a great sense of humor and I enjoyed her biography; I find it fascinating she could write such a dark, sad story as Ethan Frome.

    See the August 30, 2008, note in which I mention that I corresponded with an American woman in England, Colette. My last note to her was about June, 2009. She wrote about continuing problems with her husband (infidelity, sex) and I did not answer. I felt that our notes were becoming too personal with a very difficult subject. I would enjoy hearing from her to get an update, but I don’t have plans to initiate a new correspondence.

July 5, 2009:

    I have run into a dilemma. I am using my blog to record my reading program milestones, my reviews, etc. Because I don’t like doing things twice, that means what I put on my blog is not being put here even when it has to do with my reading program. I’m not sure what to do. For now, if there seem to be gaps here, check my blog: http://themilliondollarway.blogspot.com. (It will link my literature site.)

    I am in my Edith Wharton phase: I have skimmed the Hermione Lee biography of Wharton; I have read Edith’s autobiography, A Backward Glance, and I have just completed what she considered her best novel: Ethan Frome.

    I had always wanted to read Edith Wharton but a recent discovery of a critical analysis of Willa Cather and Edith Wharton in Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar’s No Man’s Land spurred me into starting. I first read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and then moved on to Wharton. It was a slog to get through My Ántonia (the subject did not interest me, the writing was unsophisticated, and it had no action/no plot) but by the time I finished I was a wreck; very tearful, just a great story.  Willa Cather really makes one believe that Ántonia/Tony is a real person. It was awesome. After that I read Ethan Frome, which did not have the same emotional impact.

December 13, 2008:

    A comment on Amazon.com’s “Vine” program (see next entry dated September 2, 2008): I think this program is a scam to some extent. I have ordered several books and they are all very, very bad. I can see why they are giving them away. The few good items they have, they run out of so quickly one cannot order them, but it is very good advertising.  I probably won’t order any more from Vine. Update, July 5, 2009: I continue to order occasionally from Amazon Vine. My views have not changed. However, it’s a great marketing ploy: a) first, they create some buzz on books by getting people to review them; and b) they find out what we are interested in by teasing us with products (non-books) that are not available. [Update, April 17, 2017: I haven’t ordered a book from Amazon Vine in several years.]

September 2, 2008:

    I am really happy with my reading program. Because of my history of reviews on Amazon.com, I was selected (among thousands more) to become a member of the “vine.”  As a member, I am given the opportunity to select up to four books about every two months which will be mailed to me free and free to keep – as long as I place a review on Amazon.com on at least three of the four selections. The first selection was a book so bad I can’t remember the title and I can’t find it on my bookshelves. It was a first-hand account of a lawyer who hated his profession and has since dropped out to write. I think he is still a lawyer. Regardless his stories of law school are truly disgusting.

    Today, I was sent When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy by Chet Raymo.  Raymo is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Stonehill College in North Easton, MA. He is the author of twelve books on science and nature. He has written extensively on science, particularly nature. For twenty years he was a science columnist for the Boston Globe.  In this slim book Raymo posits his “late-life credo,” in which he traces his half-century journey from traditional faith-based Catholicism to scientific agnosticism. It is a very enjoyable read. It dovetails nicely with my own reading program. Herewith some fragments that remind me of my reading program and of the wonderful opportunity to explore the world while in the Air Force:
    
    Chapter One: Teilhard de Chardin; Graham Greene (p. 3); Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain (p. 3); Trappist monk.
    Chapter Two: Charles Darwin, comets.
    Chapter Three: Musee d’Orsay, Paris (p. 15); Richard Dawkins, p. 19; dervish, p. 21; Cambellesque (Joseph Campbell), p. 21; Heloise and Abelard, p. 22.
    Chapter Four: London’s Victoria Station, p. 25; Charles Darwin (Down House, Downe, England, fourteen miles south of London), p. 25; physician/essayist, Lewis Thomas, p. 29; Goethe, p. 38.
    Chapter Five: Goethe’s science led nowhere, p. 39.
    Chapter Six: William of Ockham (14th century), p. 52
    Chapter Seven: Florence Nightingale, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Updike, William Carlos Williams, John Ruskin.
    Chapter Eight: Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Rene Descartes.
    Chapter Nine: Francis Crick, Hamer: The God Gene, p. 91.
    Chapter 10: --
    Chapter 11: Wow – the book he gave to graduating students – the 1200-page saga of 14th century Norway, Sigrid Undset’s 1928 Nobel Prize winning-novel, Kristin Lavransdatter!  Specifically Tina Nunnally’s translation.  Catholic literature, p. 122.
    Chapter 12: On death, p. 128.
    Chapter 13: --


    “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” wrote Lao Tzu, 2500 years ago. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” – p. 31. That reminds me of the Nietzsche phrase I placed in my retirement luncheon program: That which we find words for is that which we cannot hold in our heart.    -- Nietzsche

    How interesting: Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s 19th century champion, coined the word agnostic. It was first used in 1870.  Gnostics referred to those who felt they knew the answer to the Big Question, as Raymo phrases it, whereas Huxley was stating as an agnostic, he had no answer(s) to the Big Question(s).

    Raymo provides an explanation why Goethe has failed to endure, p. 39. See this link for a similar view.

    Like so many other apologists, Raymo is hypocritical. “Still, for all of my agnosticism, I call myself a Catholic. Not because I can recite the Creed (I can’t), or because I practice that particular faith (I don’t), but because the substance of Catholicism went into my system like mother’s milk.” (p. 20 – 21).  It appears he is saying that because he was born and raised a Catholic, he calls himself a Catholic. Interesting. For a professor emeritus that does not sound particularly profound.

    This is his credo: “I am an atheist, if by God one means a transcendent Person who acts willfully within the creation. I am an agnostic in that I believe our knowledge of “what is” is partial and tentative – a tiny flickering flame in the overwhelming shadows of ignorance. I am a pantheist in that I believe empirical knowledge of the sensate world is the surest revelation of whatever is worth being called divine. I am Catholic by accident of birth.”

    It sounds like he is still confused.  Does one even need a credo? I am a scientist who has trouble believing that “this” is just a random event modulated by simple mathematical laws.  That does not mean that “this” might be all there is; it just seems hard to accept that.

    [December 13, 2008: Even the title When God is Gone, Everything is Holy – yes, like genocide, abortion? No, I think a moral compass is needed. If there is nothing higher than man, then man can decide what is right and wrong.]

August 30, 2008:

    I have written Colette in the past about my reading program but today I feel like recording elsewhere (here). Colette is a therapist at Menwith Hill Station; we struck up an e-mail relationship; she is happily married and there is no other, than the e-mail, relationship between us.  However, I keep in touch with her because she may prove to be a link to others at Menwith Hill Station in the future.

    My reading program has recently included Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway. I have not completed Sylvia’s journals; I have read several biographies of Hemingway, and recently completed Islands in the Stream, the first Hemingway novel after completing several biographies of him and his wives.

    Recently I completed Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, Vol II: The New Testament.  On page 540, Asimov writes: “The church at Laodicea is bitterly condemned [by John], not for being outspokenly opposed to the doctrines favored by John, but for being neutral. John apparently prefers an honest enemy to a doubtful friend... ‘Laodicean’ has therefore entered the English language as a word meaning ‘indifferent’ or ‘neutral.’”

    Today, while browsing at Half-Price Books (with a further 20% off this Labor Day weekend), I stumbled across A Laodicean: A Story of Today by Thomas Hardy.  Only a few hours earlier I was reading Francis Wilson’s 1999 Literary Seductions.  In the introduction, early in the book, p. xviii, Wilson discusses ‘On the Western Circuit’ by Thomas Hardy.  I watched the two-part TV adaptation of this story, Day After the Fair, with a friend in 2003. It was a chick flick and something I would normally not watch, but with that particular person I was game for anything. To the best of my knowledge I have never read any Thomas Hardy novel but have always been curious, and with that as background, I may be entering the  “Hardy phase” of my reading program.  At Half-Price Books I bought a brand new copy (soft cover) of Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean and a biography of Thomas Hardy by Martin Seymour-Smith.  In the introduction to A Laodicean, the editor states that “In common with Hardy’s other novels, A Laodicean, written on the threshold of early middle age draws on deeply personal sources. He is reported to have claimed that it ‘contained more of the facts of his own life’ than anything he had written.”

    The story is summarized as follows in the introduction: “Its hero, George Somerset, strongly resembles his creator’s younger self: an architect inclined to introspection, Somerset has a history of writing poetry and a lively interest in religious controversy…The novel, however, largely turns its back on Hardy’s more distant past – the agricultural setting of his childhood and adolescence that so richly stimulated his imagination, provided the raw materials for much of his fiction and also reverberated throughout his large poetic output.” 

    So, I may be moving into a new phase: Thomas Hardy.  Something I never thought I would do.

June 20, 2008

    I am typing the entire The Waves. [August 30, 2008: sometime in early August I completed that project. I have typed The Waves in its entirety and now I can go back and explore the novel, do some research.] I have been unable to read The Waves so I thought if I typed it out I would be forced to pay attention, and it has been interesting, annotating it along the way.  I typed the entire Mrs Dalloway in verse form some time ago. While reading Mrs Dalloway the second time, I thought it read like poetry; typing it in verse form confirmed it was poetry, and I saw many things in verse form that I had not seen in prose alone.

June 11, 2008

    Update my regarding program.  I have finished several biographies of Ernest Hemingway and am now ready to start reading his novels. The first novel I read was Islands in the Stream; I finished it last night; I wrote about it elsewhere.

    I am now into my Sylvia Plath phase. I have read two biographies of her; a biography of her marriage to Ted Hughes; and a sort of biography which chronicled the biographers, particularly Anne Stevenson. I started reading her only novel, The Bell Jar, today and will eventually get to her poems.

April 18, 2008

    Update regarding my reading program.  I have moved into my Ernest Hemingway phase.  He is more incredible than I ever imagined. Again, it is too bad that students are required / encouraged to read Hemingway before first reading about the man himself. I first read Hemingway: The Final Years by Michael Reynolds (c. 1999) which really got me interested in Hemingway. It covers the years 1940 (WWII) to his suicide in 1961.  Then I started Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife who was with him for eight years, most of them before WWII, with them parting ways during the war.  That was enough to get me started.  I had read much about Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald, so A Moveable Feast was what I wanted to read first, two people Hemingway wrote about in Feast.  I really enjoyed the essays.  Then, incredibly, I picked up a hardcopy of Charles A Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway for a measly $20 at a discount bookstore!  And today I bought a hardback copy of A Moveable Feast and started reading it again, now that I know Hemingway better, understand the origin of his writing style, and know more about the authors he wrote about.  I just bought the life story of Hemingway by Carlos Baker and Mary Hemingway (his fourth wife) but have not yet started it.  So, by the time I am well into my Hemingway phase I will have completed not less than four books about him as well as A Moveable Feast.  At that point, I should be ready to tackle his novels.

    So many vignettes.  He is known to have written in short declarative sentences, a style that he was forced to use when he wrote for the Kansas City Star. Knowing that, he came a long way, and it must have been very difficult for him to write the following paragraph – one long sentence – in the opening essay of A Moveable Feast in which he describes his early days in Paris when he was a starving author:

    “All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife – second class – and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.”

    Isn’t that a great sentence for Hemingway, someone noted for writing short, declarative sentences?  One of the greatest joys I have had in life was reading in bed with the love of my life; she loved to hear me read, and I loved to read to her.  If I came across a really good sentence, I would read it again, out loud, just so we could share the sentence again.  I wish I could have that, that experience, back.  I would read out loud, she listening, with her eyes closed, big smile on her face, and I remember silently crying if the passage was particularly sad.  I don’t think May has ever seen me cry.  Of course, the line above is not sad, but it struck me not only because it is not a short, declarative sentence, but because it is also the complete paragraph.   [December 25, 2015: subsequent to the above, I re-read Islands In The Stream; I found the book incredibly boring, and it was nothing more than a memoir of those times when his three sons stayed with him in Cuba. Had the author not been Hemingway, it’s hard to believe this book would have been published.]

December 15, 2007

    Update regarding my reading program.  I finished two biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald, one by Nancy Milford and one by Sally Cline, the latter from England.  This is what I recorded elsewhere regarding Zelda after I finished the Sally Cline bio: “Tears are streaming from my eyes. I have just finished Sally Cline’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald – the story of a 20-something Southern belle who marries into the richness of the Jazz Age, and in the process is chewed up, misdiagnosed as being schizophrenic, and ends up living out her last 10 years without the love of her life, in poverty, and alone. Very alone.”  The price of genius?

    Lately I have been attracted to biographies.  I used to think that biographies were quite boring but I now find them very, very interesting; I wonder if this has something to do with age?  Although I do remember in middle school that I really enjoyed biographies of Abraham Lincoln (Carl Sandburg) and Albert Schweitzer.

    I always try to carry a book with me wherever I go; this week I didn’t have many unread paperbacks to choose from, so I chose a biography of Leonard Woolf. The author argues that Leonard Woolf was responsible for Virginia Woolf’s insanity which I find highly incredible: a) Virginia had a family history of mental illness; and b) she had two documented (major?) “nervous breakdowns”  before she even met Leonard.  I argue that Leonard’s support “saved” Virginia from a) being placed in a nursing home or mental health facility; or b) an even earlier suicide. 

    However, I do have two “new” books I am quite excited to start reading – but too heavy to carry around. The first is Henry James: A Life, by Leon Edel; and the second, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, by Paul O’Keeffe.  I don’t recall ever reading Henry James in school, but Colette mentioned remembering the pain of reading Henry James in high school.  When I saw the biography at Half Price Bookstores, I picked it up remembering Colette’s comments.  It appears that Leon Edel spent his life researching and writing about Henry James; the book I have is an abridged version of his five –volume biography of James.  About the same time I found a hardcover that attracted my attention.  The photo of the subject, Wyndham Lewis, piqued my interest, but I have put it off until I finished the Zelda biographies.  The other night, while waiting for the trucks to return to the FedEx facility (I was waiting for a package to be delivered; I was not home when they attempted to drop it off the first time), I started reading the Wyndham Lewis bio.  Wow, the writing is outstanding.  It starts out with an excellent description of a pituitary tumor, the cause of Wyndham’s death, which is some of the best non-professional medical writing I have ever read. Paging through the book, it appears that Windham was part of the Bloomsbury Group.  We will see.  I have not seen his name in all the diaries, letters, or biographies regarding Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

    I completed Lucia Joyce (daughter of James Joyce) by Schloss (the second time I have read this biography) last week, and am still reading the bio of Edmund Wilson.  I have also finally started the biography of Albert Einstein, a gift from one of May’s closest friends, Ellen Barry. Ellen sent me the book as a birthday present last year, and I put it off until I thought I would be interested in reading about Einstein (again). I remember reading an Einstein biography many, many years ago.

November 26, 2007

     I seem to be moving into a new phase: “my” F. Scott Fitzgerald / Ernest Hemingway phase.  It all started with, generally, Edmund Wilson and then more specifically, with the Nancy Milford biography of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.  I am eager to read around and about Hemingway and then his novels.  Based on the Zelda biography and the little browsing I have done at Borders Bookstore, it appears to me that there is no comparison between these two, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.  It appears to me that Fitzgerald struggled and in the end did not produce much in the way of novels, although he may have had more success with short stories.  It also appears that he stole most of his material from journals, diaries, letters of others, especially girl- and women-friends.  Only recently has it come to light that he stole from Ginerva King, his first love, a 16-year-old, when he was a Princeton student; he made typewritten copies of the love letters she sent him and from those wrote one of his successful novels.  He also stole directly from Zelda’s diary and probably her letters. I was surprised by the thinness of The Great Gatsby.  It looks like it could have been written in a long weekend. He also signed his name to many short pieces / short stories that were actually written by Zelda, knowing that he had more “star” power. He was an alcoholic from age 19 or so, and wouldn’t admit to it.  He was narcissistic – more than most, if that is possible – and I think he had a lot to do with Zelda’s insanity.

    On the other hand, it appears that Ernest Hemingway was a serious writer and really did some good stuff with his novels. I can understand why Hunter S Thompson idolized Hemingway.  I can’t wait to read some of Hemingway’s best-known works. I will have to read one or two of Fitzgerald’s novels and a couple short stories, but something tells me I won’t appreciate him much.

November 24, 2007

    Ref: Zelda by Nancy Milford; Lucia Joyce by Schloss; Edmund Wilson by Dabney Lewis.

    Zelda and Lucia both very interested in dance; both trying ballet in their 20s (way too late to begin ballet); both hospitalized by same psychiatrist in same Swiss psychiatric hospital just a few years apart (1930 vs 1934, roughly).  Very interesting.  Also, need to explore “eurhythmics” more.  Eurhythmics was a movement founded in Europe (Geneva?); Lucia became interested in it, and of course, there was a rock sensation in the 90’s: the Eurhythmics.  Eurhythmics, also called “rhythmic gymnastics” or simply “rhythmics,” is an approach used in the education of children to music.

    Reading about Zelda and Lucia it is interesting to see how F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and others crossed paths.  Simply fascinating.  I find myself moving into phases.  I find myself moving into a new phase; I can’t remember how it first started.  I do remember that I read something that took me back to Edmund Wilson, who seems to be the center of so much of the early 20th century literature with which I am familiar.  I am still reading Edmund Wilson.  Because of this reading, I will have to read some of Hemingway, including A Moveable Feast, as well as Zelda’s only novel, Save Me For The Last Waltz, which, based on excerpts, may not be all that good. We will see. 

    So, my addiction to literature continues.

    I have been typing quite a bit from Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: at least a few paragraphs from each chapter, and much more of several chapters.

    I am also typing a bit from Harold Bloom’s Critical Views of Virginia Woolf, an anthology of critical essays.

    Stacked beside my reading chair is also an abridged edition of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters and Tadié’s biography of Marcel Proust.

    So, that’s my reading list for the moment.

November 19, 2007

    Wow! I wish I had someone to share this with. I am so excited.

    Sometime ago, perhaps two or three years ago I literally stumbled across Edmund Wilson.  I had no idea who he was, but I am now reading him and those in his circle.  Wow, what a trip!  It’s a whole new world – all the American writers in the early 20th century.  I am reading a biography of Edmund Wilson, and I am also reading a biography of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.  And their biographies overlap completely.  And they bring in so many other poets / writers I have read or read about: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Marianne Moore (in fact I feel connected with Marianne Moore in some way, and have “fallen in love” with her, if that’s possible – after the rum and Coke, I think anything is possible)[Commonplace Notes on Marianne Moore], T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein. They don’t mention Virginia Woolf, but they do mention Anaïs Nin – to whom Edmund Wilson wrote.  Wow!  It is very, very interesting. 

    I am now listening to Leonard Cohen Dance Me to the End of Love. 

    I am also reading the biography of James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia Joyce – fascinating story.  So simultaneously three biographies: Lucia Joyce, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and Edmund Wilson. They all cross paths at points – perhaps best connection is with Ezra Pound, who connects with Edmund Wilson and with James Joyce.  And, I am also re-reading and typing some portions of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae.  We just saw the new move Beowulf, so I pulled out my two copies of Beowulf [1. Seamus 2. Norton Critical edition, prose translation] and looked at that story again.

November 2, 2007

    I am substitute teaching at high school and middle school at Fort Sam Houston.  I have spent a number of days teaching 6th grade English.  The teacher is reading a contemporary novel Rats to the children, and currently the children are reading, together, another contemporary novel, Hatchet.  I just took a look at my notes on Robinson Crusoe.  It is obvious to me that one could find a version of Robinson Crusoe that would be appropriate for 6th graders.  Robinson Crusoe is a classic, considered the first English novel, and certainly a better choice than the contemporary novel.  I honestly don’t understand it; there is so little time, and so little reading that is required, it seems that I would work to make the most of that limited time, exposing children / adolescents / young adults to best literature possible.

    Currently reading:  Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia; biography of Edmund Wilson (Lewis M. Danbey); edited Ruskin’s Modern Painters; Constants of Nature (physics, math).

July 1, 2007

    The biography of Graham Greene, by Norman Sherry, led me to Joseph Conrad, and I have quickly read, but need to re-read, Heart of Darkness, and am currently reading Lord Jim.  I assume I will complete Joseph Conrad by reading The Secret Agent.   (By the way, I am nearly finished with the first volume of the 3-volume biography of Greene by Sherry.)

    While reading critical essays on Joseph Conrad, I was led to Ford Madox Ford, a name I recognized from my pre-Raphaelite readings.  I was confused.  It turns out that Ford Madox Ford was the grandson of Ford Madox Brown, the Pre-Raphaelite painter.  The younger Madox (born Ford Hermann Hueffer) wrote a biography of his grandfather.

    Ford Madox Ford wrote The Good Soldier (1915), which has been tagged as the “best French novel written in English.” 

    Ford Madox Ford founded The English Review in 1908 and published Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy, and William Butler Yeats. 

    Finally, FMF collaborated on two novels with Joseph Conrad.

June 1, 2007

    I am really enjoying the first volume of three of Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene, the famous 20th century English author:  self-destructive, suicidal, and oversexed.  I have comprehensive notes in a commonplace book elsewhere (not yet transcribed).

April 21, 2007

    I have finished Juliet Barker’s The Brontës.    By the time I got about halfway through it was becoming quite tedious, too much detail.  I scanned through the last half fairly quickly.  This is a great reference book.

April 15, 2007

    I am so excited!  I stumbled across a “new” biography of the Brontës!  This is the biography that may be the definitive biography of the Brontës (at least for the next ten years).  It is written by an English Ph.D. who was a curator at the Brontë parsonage and museum for six years.  This book, the product of 11 years of research, 830 pages long, with an additional 152 pages of notes, and 20 pages of index.  This will keep me occupied for many weeks.  I have already 50 pages and so far it has only been about Patrick Brontë, the patriarch, and finally he is engaged, but not yet married, to Maria Branwell.  Wow, this book gets into the weeds.

November 30, 2006

    I love to write letters, and I love to talk about what I’m reading.  Unfortunately, I’ve not found anyone who shares my interests, and I often feel my letters fall on deaf ears.  The recipients always tell me they enjoy my letters but they don’t seem to engender any further discussion.  The other night I realized that I have been blessed with two grandchildren whom I will enjoy writing to. 
    
    In addition, if Laura continues with her plans as a missionary, I am sure she will enjoy letters from me, and who knows, perhaps she can share the letters with those she ministers to.  We will see.

August 24, 2006

     I am reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, edited by her husband Leonard, and first published in 1953.  It is absolutely fascinating on my levels, but for the purpose of this chapter, it is fascinating because she mentions so many famous writers and how reading prepared her for her own writing.  She also wanted to a write a book compiling all her essays about literature.  She mentions all the great 19th century female authors, the Brontës, George Eliot and Jane Austin, and then she goes on from there.  It is absolutely fascinating.  I feel I have found a soul mate.  I’m not sure I can go back to Jane Austen or the others.

July 10, 2006

    Now I have two grandchildren to read to.  Olivia Rae was born on this date, July 10, 2006, at York Hospital, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

May 10, 2005:

    Somewhere at home, I have started a little book for Arianna -- about the progression of storytelling; I forget the reference that got me started.

    I have started reviewing that very short anthology, and have started reading some of the selections.

    It is interesting how fast so many literary dots can be connected.

    I’m not sure how to organize my thoughts about the literature I’m reading, but I’m going to try.

    So, let’s get started. Many of the longer passages below were “cut and paste” items from the internet, so not all entries are original.  It should be obvious which writing is mine and which is taken from other sources. 

    May 10, 2005, is when I first started this chapter, but from this point on, I will update the information below but will not date the additions or modifications.  Comments regarding this chapter will continue to be dated and will be placed at the top, in chronological order, the newest entry at the top.

  
Evolution of Story-Telling
(also posted here) 

Overview:  Harold Bloom’s Western Canon.

Authors

    1.  First, somewhere, I need to find the reference and then recap the progression of storytelling:
        a.  The Bible: Book of J
        b.  Oral sagas, poetry:  Iliad, Odyssey
        c.  Sagas, poetry:  Beowulf
        d.  Sagas, prose:  Icelandic Sagas
        e.  Historical, prose: Bede
        f.  Poetry, English: Chaucer (c. 1343 – 1400), Spenser (1552 – 1599)
            i.  Chaucer:  father of English literature?
            ii.  Spenser:  emigrated to Ireland; premier craftsman - English verse in its infancy
        g.  Drama, poetry:  Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Goethe (1749 – 1832)
        h.  Christian allegory:  John Bunyan (1628 – 1688)
        i.  Novels; first one was Don Quixote; then Jane Austen, Thackeray, Brontës
        j.  Novellas
        k.  Mysteries:  Poe (influenced Symbolism [French] which led to Modernism)
        l.  Modernism
        m.  Gonzo journalism:  Hunter S. Thompson
        n.  Graphic Novels

    2.  Brontës (the first of the 19th century Yorkshire women authors:  Brontës, Austen, George Eliot)
        a.  Much preparation [prepared myself well before reading the Brontës]
        b.  Re-read Wuthering Heights, Cliff’s Notes, Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Brontë; Jane Eyre, Cliff Notes
        c.  The 19th Century Female Authors:  represents the “renaissance in female writing, see The Madwoman in the Attic by SM Gilbert and SM Gubar
        d.  1994 biography, The Brontës by Juliet Barker.  Great reference book; should be the last biography of the Brontës – unless something new in the Brontë archives turns up.  The author suggests that Wuthering Heights follows Rob Roy too closely to be a coincidence. (April 21, 2007)

    3.  Jane Austen:  Pride and Prejudice  (I finished Northanger Abbey also in 2006)

    4.  George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
        a.  Middle-march

            1) This novel is referenced more often than I had noticed before.  This is a very important novel and I highly recommend reading it as soon as one feels comfortable reading a long, 19th century novel.

    5.  C. S. Lewis:  Collected Letters, Volume I, 1905 - 1931
       
        a.  During the Lord of the Rings craze (due to the movies) I came to know of C. S. Lewis, a friend of JRR Tolkien

        b.  In addition, Laura, my daughter, has been influenced by C. S. Lewis and asked me to read some of his works.

        c.  So, when I found this volume in “Half-Price Bookstores,” hardcover, published 2004, I couldn’t believe it.  I love letters, especially before the author is a known entity.

        d.  C. S. Lewis had a classical English education and his letters are filled with references to the classics and to English literature

        e.  Interestingly enough, it appears that he was quite absorbed by the Brontës when he was about 17 years old, and at college.  I was reading this in his letters at the very time I, coincidentally, was enjoying Brontë, and then Austen, which C. S. Lewis also references.

        f.  I forget, but I believe I first saw a reference to Spenser in C. S. Lewis’ Collected Letters.  I bought a used copy of Spenser’s Faerie Queene after reading about it on the net.  It will be a challenge to read this book but it is now on my reading list.

        g.  In the minimal research I did on Faerie Queene I came across a book called Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia that has piqued my interest.  Whether I read this book depends on whether I like it when I thumb through it at the bookstore.  Reviews suggest the first chapter is excellent but then after that, it may not be so good.  [Incidentally, I do recall coming across this book and glancing through it at one time while browsing in a bookstore; it was many, many years ago.]   
    
        h.  During the year 1915 (his collected letters are arranged in chapters based on the year they were written in), it seems C. S. Lewis compared much of what he read to the Brontës.

    6.  Hunter S. Thompson

        a.  Speaking of letters, I believe The Proud Highway is the first set of letters I had ever read, and enjoyed them immensely.

        b.  Prior to my newfound enthusiasm in literature, I had read a couple of HST’s books and thoroughly enjoyed them (Hell’s Angels comes to mind); I recently finished his Rum Diary -- it was interesting; it was HST style, but it didn’t have a plot -- but many other great books did not have a plot, Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come to mind.  Ulysses simply covers a day in the life of Stephen Bloom and Mrs Dalloway simply covers one in the life of Clarissa (?) when she goes out shopping, preparing for her dinner party that evening, and the party itself.

    7.  Ovid’s The Erotic Poems

        a.  While searching “Half-Price Books” to satisfy my new enthusiasm for literature, I came across a Penguin edition of this book.  It had a great introduction by Peter Green, who happened to be born in London, and had had a classical education but ended up at the University of Texas (Austin) and then the University of Iowa

        b.  Peter Green, in that introduction, references much of the literature I am now familiar with, including Nabokov (see below), Brontë, and Byron (see below).

        c.  In the introduction, for example (p. 63):  “No one would deny Ovid’s bookishness.  But is it inherently probable that he was the psychological forerunner of a writer such as Emily Brontë?  His cheerfully pragmatic attitude to sex shows not a trace of that murky Gothic symbolism which always seems to hang about the parthenogenetic Heathcliffs of the world.”  Had I not read Wuthering Heights, this reference would not have made any sense.

        d.  Green goes on to say in his introduction, “Any feeling he may have retained for human relationships is carefully suppressed, and further distanced by a battery of recondite allusions.  Here one suggestive modern parallel is T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, also the work of a bookish and allusive author, similarly given -- perhaps, again, as a form of camouflage or self-protection -- to literary quotation and parody.

    8.  T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land.  I had vaguely heard of this book.  Seeing a reference in Ovid’s Poems intrigued me, and I looked it up on the net.

        a.  Some consider The Waste Land the most important poem in the 20th century.
        b.  The Waste Land was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.

    9.  The Romantics.  While reading a book review by Christopher Hitchens of Lermontov’s A Hero in Our Time, I realized I couldn’t understand his reference without a bit of background.  Therefore I did a quick review and this is what I discovered:

        a.  The three great Romantics are:  Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Keats (or as I call them:  shelleybyronandkeats)
        b.  Shelley and Byron were friends, and traveled in the same circles.
        c.  Shelley married Mary (daughter of one of the first feminists); she wrote Frankenstein
        d.  Having read the biographical thumbnail sketches of Shelley and Byron, I now understand them better.  I understand the Byron persona -- at least better than I did at one time.
        e.  Pushkin, Russian-Ethiopian (black), took ideas from liberal, revolutionary Russia and tried to instill them into his Tsarist Russia; he eventually gave up and supported the Tsar
        f.  Lermontov took up the mantel, where Pushkin left off, and subsequently wrote A Hero in Our Time.  I sent that review to Kiri, and learned that not only had she read that novel in the original Russian, she had to write essays in Russian on the novel

    10.  Virginia Woolf

        a.  The Bloomsbury Group:  very small, but very influential in the literary and the art world.  I know the general public is not aware how important this group was.  Even John Maynard Keynes, the famous British economist, was part of this group.

        b.  I think Virginia Woolf might be the most important, certainly the most influential, of the modernists.

        c.  I think Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was the feminist’s answer to Joyce’s Ulysses.  It would be a great doctoral thesis, although it has probably already been done.  Virginia Woolf did not like Joyce (too sexist and rough) and her initial reactions to Ulysses were negative.  However, after the novel’s form and structure were explained to her, she did note that she re-read it, probably more than once.  She was re-reading it at the very time she was working on Mrs Dalloway.  Both Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway take place in one day (dawn to late evening).  And whereas critics have pointed out how much Joyce described Dublin in that novel, Woolf did the same in her novel, but London.  Joyce loved Dublin, as much as Woolf loved London. And, of course, the two novels are both very autobiographical.

        d. “Woolf was also a master of a related literary form called free indirect discourse, in which the identity of the narrator is not entirely clear. The novel abounds with dialogue that is not demarcated by quotation marks, as well as phrases and passages that could easily be spoken or merely thought. This form of narration is told in the third person, but it conveys a sense of the character's internal thoughts from the character's own experience, thereby expressing these thoughts somewhere between a first-person and third-person mode of narrative.” (Source: http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/lighthouse/fullsumm.html, March 20, 2007)

        e. “One of the great innovations of modernist novels is the stream of consciousness technique, whereby the writer tries to capture a character's unbroken flow of internal thoughts. Thus an author can describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of a character without the devices of objective narration or dialogue. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf makes constant use of this technique, and it is established as the predominant style from the beginning. In this novel, the action occurs not in the outside world but in the thoughts and feelings of the characters as exhibited by the ongoing narrative. Although there is a narrative voice apart from any of the characters, a large portion of the narrative consists of the exposition of each characters' consciousness. Some sections use entire pages without letting an objective voice interrupt the flow of thoughts of a single character.
        “As a literary device, stream of consciousness was perhaps the most fitting counterpart to contemporary work being done by Sigmund Freud regarding the existence and function of the human unconscious. Freud newly posited the theory that there is a portion of the mind to which we do not have complete access, with the implication that we cannot know all of our own thoughts, fears, motivations, and desires. Writers and artists of this period were intrigued by this concept, and they sought in various ways to depict and illuminate the human unconscious. Although stream of consciousness (as its name implies) is the illumination of thoughts and feelings that characters consciously experience, Woolf reaches much further into the human mind than a conventional narrative about the past, providing an intimate view of a character's interiority.” (Source: http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/lighthouse/fullsumm.html, March 20, 2007)

    11.  The Poet:

        Some years ago, a close friend (Sebastian Vogt), a language instructor (German and English), and literature teacher, told me he asked his students to define a poet.  I thought about and couldn’t do it.  So now, whenever I read something that talks about what a poet is, the subject has special meaning.  Elsewhere in this document I provide definitions of a poet.

[CAVEAT:  since this chapter was intended for personal use only, much of the information is “cut and paste” directly from internet sources, such as “wiki,” as well as some other non-internet sources.]




Definitions, Writing, Concepts


Story vs plot, from Virginia Woolf, by Susan Dick, p. xi
    The story is what happens
    The plot is the “active” interpretative work of discourse on story, “the way the story gets told.”

Evolution of Storytelling

Epic sagas, oral:   poetry
Epic sagas, written:   poetry
Novella, written:  prose
Drama:  poetry
Novels:  prose

Epic Sagas, Oral

Iliad / Odyssey:  6th century B.C.

6th century BC, Homer “dictates” stories to scribe; based on earlier material possibly dating back to the 8th century BC (two hundred years earlier).

It should go without saying that to really, really "understand the whole issue of Homer," one must "know Milman Parry. Start with the wiki entry if nothing else.

The Greeks

Keep forgetting the order of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates?  It’s very easy:  SPA – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Socrates spoke; did not write.  Plato published (wrote).  And Aristotle added.   Plato was enamored with Socrates, who was tried, convicted and executed. Aristotle was Plato’s most famous student. Aristotle is considered the first scientist.

Plato’s dialogues: the protagonist was often Socrates. Plato’s dialogues: early, middle, late. The early dialogues followed Socrates closely, but middle and later periods, Plato developed his own voice. The Symposium was written in Plato’s middle period.

Epic Sagas, Written

Beowulf: 1100 A.D. First thing to note -- look at the "distance" between Homer and the writer of Beowulf.

Written in Old English, about 1100 A.D. 

Based on exploits of a great Scandinavian warrior from the 6th century.  May and I saw the “animated” Beowulf epic, November, 2007; excellent movie; the movie was ranked number 1 for the first couple of weekends.  The movie had an interesting story line:  the King of the Geats was the father of Grendel; and Beowulf was the father of the unnamed dragon (mother of both Grendel and the dragon, of course, was the woman, who was a beautiful, sexual being, according to the movie version). Much of the original Beowulf is missing, and there’s no reason why this story line couldn’t be accurate, especially given the fact that Beowulf only stated he killed Grendel’s mother. Whereas he brought back the head of Grendel, he never brought back the head of his mother.  It does make one wonder.

The Icelandic Sagas:  15th, 16th, and 17th centuries; anomalous for their times)

Novella

The Decameron:  1353

   http://www.bartleby.com/61/81/N0178100.html

A novella is a short, narrative, prose fiction work.  Like the English word “novel,” the English word “novella” derives from the Italian word “novella” (plural: “novelle”), for a tale, a piece of news.  As the etymology suggests, novellas originally were news of town and country life worth repeating for amusement and edification.

 As a literary genre, the novella’s origin lay in the early Renaissance literary work of the Italians and the French.  Principally, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 - 1375), author of The Decameron (1353) -- one hundred novellae told by ten people, seven women and three men, fleeing the Black Death by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills, in 1348; and by the French Queen, Marguerite de Navarre (1492 - 1549), [aka Marguerite de Valois], author of Heptameron (1559) -- seventy-two original French tales (structured like The Decameron).  Her psychological acuity and didactic purpose outweigh the unfinished collection’s weak literary style.

Not until the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries did writers fashion the novella into a literary genre structured by precepts and rules.  Contemporaneously, the Germans were the most active writers of the Novelle (German: “novella”; plural: “novellen”).  For the German writer, a novella is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length -- a few pages to hundreds --restricted to a single, suspenseful event, situation, or conflict leading to an unexpected turning point (Wendepunkt), provoking a logical, but surprising end; Novellen tend to contain a concrete symbol, which is the narration’s steady point.

In the German, the English word novella is novelle, and the English word novel is the German roman, this etymological distinction avoids confusion of the literatures and the forms, with the novel being the more important, established fictional form.  The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s (1881 - 1942), Die Schachnovelle (1942) {The Check Novel], translated (1944) as The Royal Game, is an example of a title naming its genre.

In English, a novella is a story midway -- in length (30 - 40,000 words) and structural complexity -- between a short story (500 - 15,000 words) and a novel (60,000 words, minimum).  A novella focuses upon a single chain of events with a psychologically surprising turning point, e.g., Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 94); and Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924).

Commonly, longer novellas are addressed as novels; though incorrectly, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Heart of Darkness are called novels, as are many science fiction works such as War of the Worlds and Armageddon 2419 A.D.  Occasionally, longer works are addressed as novellas, with some academics positing 100,000 words as the novella-novel threshold.  In the science fiction genre, the Hugo and Nebula literary awards define the novella as “A ... story of between seventeen thousand, five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words.”

HOWEVER: there is a nice discussion of “novella” in the introduction to the Wordsworth edition of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome:

Novel vs novella. How to classify the book remains a problems. Wharton herself referred to Ethan Frome as a ‘tale,’ a story,’ a ‘novel,’ a ‘short novel,’ and, in Henry James’s expression, a ‘nouvelle’; and the book is listed in indexes today under similarly diverse categories. For many critics now, however, ‘nouvelle’ (or ‘nouvella’) seems a belittling term; and when applied to fiction by a woman writer, it might seem to suggest a product less robust and significant than the work of her fellow male artists. Katherine Anne Porter forcefully dismissed the word, enjoining her own readers in 1965:

[Please do not call my short novels Novelettes, or even worse, Novella. Novelette is classical usage for a trivial, dime-novel sort of thing; Novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything. Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels.]

Nevertheless, especially when used in its period context, ‘novella’ describes a literary form with a rich history. Many of the most commanding works of Wharton’s contemporaries among them, Conrad, James, Lawrence, Harding, Davis, Chopin, Gilman) are novellas, and Wharton herself had already successfully attempted the form in some of her most powerful early fictions….

English Poetry

Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599):

    The Fairie Queene, 1590
        Very, very important, according to Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae

Top quoted poets:

    Shakespeare, Tennyson, Pope (in that order)

English Poets

    Spenser (1552 – 1599)
    
    Shakespeare, William (1564 – 1616):

        Major contemporary poets [their age when Shakespeare was 30]
            Edmund Spenser, 1552 – 1599 [42]
            Sir Philip Sidney, 1554 – 1586 [40]
            John Donne, 1572 – 1631 [22] – works not published until 1633
            Ben Jonson, 1572 – 1637 [22]

        When you think sonnets (little songs), think Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson
            Donne: very convoluted
            Jonson: very simple



    Tennyson, Alfred (1809 – 1892): a number of phrases now commonplace in English language
        “nature, red in tooth and claw”   
        “better to have loved and lost”
        “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”
        “My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure.”

    Pope, Alexander (1688 – 1744): greatest English poet of the early 18th century; best known for his satirical verse and his translation of Homer; a master of the heroic couplet (iambic pentameter, masculine verse)

    Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848)

    From Reading the Brontës: An Introduction to Their Novels and Poetry, by Charmian Knight and Luke Spencer:  “As well as my selection of Emily’s poems, there is another poem here for you to read. It is by Sylvia Plath, the American poet who spent some of her short life (like Emily, she died at thirty – suicide, perhaps accidental) in the West Riding of Yorkshire and was buried there in 1963. Caleld ‘Wuthering Heights,’ it registers Plath’s strong response to the moorland surroundings of Haworth and can serve as an introduction to the themes and images of Emily’s poetry which I want to consider.”  Earlier, Luke Spencer wrote:  “Emily Brontë’s poetry is generally regarded as some of the finest written in the 19th century and at least the equal of anything produced by other women poets of that period, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti.”

Drama

Shakespeare:  1564 – 1616

    The “five-act tragedy” and sonnets.

    Shakespeare was writing at a time when Modern English was still in its early stages. According to wiki.com: Modern English developed with the Great Vowel Shift that began in 15th-century England, and continues to adopt foreign words from a variety of languages, as well as coining new words. The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1450 and 1750.The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.  Shakespeare wrote in the late 1590’s and early 1600’s, literally right during the Great Vowel Shift. The values of the long vowels form the main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English and Modern English, and the Great Vowel Shift is one of the historical events marking the separation of Middle and Modern English. Originally, these vowels had "continental" values much like those remaining in Italian and liturgical Latin. However, during the Great Vowel Shift, the two highest long vowels became diphthongs, and the other five underwent an increase in tongue height with one of them coming to the front.

The Novel

Don Quixote: 1605

    The novel:  a merging of realistic and the romantic, the mimetic (the imitative) and the fantastic (http://www.answers.com/novel).

    The realistic and romantic tendencies converge in Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), which describes the adventures of an aging country gentleman who, inspired by chivalric romances, sets out to do good in an ugly world.  A brilliant, humanistic study of illusion and reality, Don Quixote is considered by many critics to be the most important single progenitor of the novel.

    Virginia Woolf comments at some length on Cervantes / Don Quixote in her diary, see Thursday, August, 5, 1920, A Writer’s Diary, published in 1953, and edited by her husband Leonard.

Daniel DeFoe: b. 1660; five novels, 1719 – 1722 — Father Of The English Novel

    Remember: Sir Walter Scott is customarily hailed as “the father of the historical novel. Defoe’s place in its development is often slighted when not ignored. Scott was fond of Defoe’s work and felt that Defoe “would have deserved immortality for the genius he has displayed in A Journal of the Plague Years as well as in the Memoirs of a Cavalier,” even if he had not given the world Robinson Crusoe.” – John J. Burke, Jr., in Daniel Defoe, Modern Critical Views, 1987 (edited by Harold Bloom).

    Several 18th century novels, each essentially realistic (wow, until November 12, 2017, I had never paid attention to that word, “realistic.” (see my entry dated November 12, 2017), has at one time or another been designated the first novel in English.  Daniel Defoe is famous for Robinson Crusoe (1719), a detailed and convincingly realistic account, based on a real event, of the successful efforts of an island castaway to survive.  Also in this realistic tradition is Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders (1722), which relates the picaresque adventures of a good-natured harlot and thief.  Defoe is considered by some to be the first journalist.  According to “inventors.about.com” (http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/printing_4.htm) Daniel Defoe published The Review in 1704, making him the first journalist.  There were older newspapers and therefore older contributors to these newspapers, but it is possible that the website considers Defoe’s articles leading the way to the modern newspaper. 

Samuel Richardson, 1689 – 1761; Pamela (1740); Clarissa (1748) and Pamela

Laurence Sterne, 1713 - 1768, Tristram Shandy, nine volumes, 1759 – 1767. A must-read is the Everyman’s Library edition, with an introduction by Peter Conrad, c. 1991, but included in Everyman’s Library as early as 1912. In the introduction, these four novelists were, perhaps, the “founding fathers” of the English novel: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne, and Cervantes, though not English. Mentioned in passing in the introduction: Marianne Moore, Jane Eyre, Don Juan (Byron), Hamlet, Whitman’s Prelude, and many others, particularly Fielding’s Tom Jones. From page viii of the introduction, “… Sterne discovers a new way of writing and a new way of understanding human nature which makes his book a sacred text both for Romantic poets and modern novelists, who like him want to liberate literature from its self-imposed and unnecessary rules.”  
    
    Note:  Benjamin Franklin opined that “John Bunyan was the first to mix narration and dialogue, a method very engaging to the reader…” and went on to say that Daniel Defoe did the same, as did Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). 


The Seventeenth Century

Scientific Revolution: children of Francis Bacon and Galileo
    Generally dated to have begun 1543: Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
    The idea of progress pretty much an invention of 17th century Europe – Raymo, 2008

    1637: Descartes publishes Discourse on the Method
        Stands at dividing line between medieval and modern
        Some say the Enlightenment began with Discourse on the Method
        Generally, the Enlightenment is said to have begin in the 18th century
        It ended with the French Revolution according to many historians

    Modernity / rationalism allowed thoughts of sexual equality, sexual freedom
    Philosophers now starting to hold sway; they held sway in 17th and 18th centuries
    “Dechristianizing” became an official component of the  modernizing program of         the French Revolution (1789 – 1799).

The Eighteenth Century

    The Romantic Period perhaps overlaps exactly the life of Goethe, born in 1749 and died in 1832. Perhaps: Goethe, Victor Hugo, Delacroix are most important.

    Samuel Richardson (1689 - 1761); major English, 18th century writer, best known for his three epistolary novels:  Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded; Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady; and, Sir Charles Grandison.  (I opined that Virginia Woolf chose to name Mrs Dalloway after Richardson’s Clarissa.)  Pamela became the first novel printed in America when Benjamin Franklin reprinted it from the fourth London edition! – p. 18. (1742 – 1744 edition)

    In England, the Bluestocking phenomenon was, perhaps, the catalyst that stimulated some of the great women writers of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.  For background, see:                                             
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/wobrilliantwomen1.asp.

    It is a difficult book to read, but The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, edited by Hubert Wellington, c. 1951, 1995, Phaidon Press, is quite interesting. It is said that the height of Romantic literature was in 1830 with Victor Hugo’s play Hernani.

The Gothic Novel

    Ann Radcliffe, 1764 – 1823, English author; considered a pioneer of the gothic novel.  Mysteries of Udolpho  Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and also referenced in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.  Also influenced Sir Walter Scott.

Transition to Romanticism

“They (Samuel Johnson and Boswell) first met in the back parlour of Tom Davies’s bookshop on the afternoon of Monday, 16 May 1763.  Johnson was born in 1709, so Johnson was 54 and Boswell was 24.  If Johnson had been born in 1680 and Boswell in 1710, the difference between them would merely have been the difference between youth and middle age; but since Johnson’s birth date was 1709 and Boswell’s 1740 they are separated by one of those seismic cracks in the historical surface. Boswell is a new man in Johnson’s world; he belongs to the epoch of Rousseau (Romanticism; whereas Johnson was still classical); all the attitudes that we associate with the end of the eighteenth century – the onset of ‘sensibility,’ the obsession with the individual and the curious, the swelling tide of subjective emotion – are strongly present in him. Where Johnson still belongs to the world of Aristotle and Aquinas, the world of the giant system-builders, Boswell inhabits the ruins of that world. Where Johnson instinctively proceeds by erecting a framework and then judging the particular instance in relation to that framework, Boswell is the sniffing bloodhound who will follow the scent of individuality into whatever territory it leads him. The fascination of their dialogue, that dialogue of mind, heart and voice round which Boswell organized his great Life, is that is it not merely between two very different men but between two epochs.  In its pages, Romantic Europe speaks to Renaissance Europe, and is answered.” – Samuel Johnson, A Biography, John Wain, p. 229 – 230.


Romanticism

1749 – 1832
Rosseau’s essay:  1749
Death of Goethe:  1832

The big four:      France – Rousseau
            Germany – Goethe
            England – Wordsworth and Coleridge

    Romantics:  Rousseau, Goethe, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats.  William Butler Yeats, born in 1865, referred to his generation as “the last romantics.”  In France: painters Theodore Gericault, Eugene Delacroix; authors Victor Hugo and Stendhal; the composer Hector Berlioz.  In Russia:  Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov (influenced Lord Byron); the poet Fyodor Tyutchev.

    The French writer Rousseau is considered the father of the Romantic Movement, following his essay published in 1749, as part of a contest to answer the question: “Had the advance of the sciences and arts helped to destroy or purify moral standards?”  For quick review of these advances, see notes on philosophy.  (At that file, scroll down to Chapter 3, “Brave New World.”)

    It is interesting to note that Rousseau’s landmark essay was published in 1749, the year Goethe was born.  By the time of Goethe’s death, writing was moving toward the “Modernist” era.  One man, Goethe, can be said to have spanned the exact era of the Romantic Movement.

    The Romantic Period perhaps overlaps exactly the life of Goethe, born in 1749 and died in 1832.

    Williams Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads.

    (Note: Romanticism was probably a reaction to scientific advances that had occurred between the late 13th century and the 17th century.  We now refer to that period as the Renaissance.  From wiki: “It was not until the 19th century that the French word Renaissance achieved popularity in describing the cultural movement that began in the late 13th century. The Renaissance was first defined by French historian Jules Michelet (1798 - 1874), in his 1855 work, Histoire de France.  For Michelet, the Renaissance was more a development in science than in art and culture.  He asserted that is spanned the period from Columbus to Copernicus to Galileo; that is, from the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 17th century.”  Others had their own definitions.)

    More on Goethe: From The New Yorker, February 1, 2016, “Design for Living: What’s great about Goethe?” by Adam Kirsch.

“English speakers are more hospitable to fiction in translation, and yet when was the last time you heard someone mention “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” or “Elective Affinities,” Goethe’s long fictions? These books have a good claim to have founded two of the major genres of the modern novel—respectively, the Bildungsroman and the novel of adultery. Goethe’s first novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” is better known, mainly because it represented such an enormous milestone in literary history; the first German international best-seller, it is said to have started a craze for suicide among young people emulating its hero. But in English it remains a book more famous than read.”
    


Pre-Raphaelites

The last phase (of the Romantic era) of transformation into Victorian culture.

See my Commonplace Notes.

    I think I read somewhere the Pre-Raphaelite phase lasted only five (5) years – that needs to be confirmed.

The Realistic Novel

    From John Wain’s biography of Samuel Johnson:  “As a critic Johnson was always rather unresponsive to the realistic novel, the most important new form to arise in his lifetime.” – Samuel Johnson, A Biography, John Wain, p. 203




The Nineteenth Century

Novel became the leading form of literature in English in the 19th century.
19th century often regarded as a high point in British literature
Popular works opened a market for the novel among the reading public.

    Pre-Victorian authors:  Jane Austen, Walter Scott (both perfected closely-observed social satire and adventure stories.

    Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was the first American author to attempt to make his living solely by writing. He was the inventor of the detective novel and his genre was gothic.

There are numerous sub-categories of novel:
the realistic novel
the Bildungsroman (Goethe: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship)
the novel of adultery (Goethe: Elective Affinities)

The “Strange Pause”
1820s and 1830s

The “strange” pause coined by the historian G.M. Young
fell between the Romantics and the Victorians
modern scholars unsure what happened during this troublesome transition phase between the deaths of shelleybyronandkeats and the rise of Dickens
personality, novelist, poetess: Leticia Elizabeth Landon

Pre-Victorian

Sir Walter Scott:  Waverley, 1814; Rob Roy
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816

    The novel became the dominant form of Western literature in the 19th century, which produced many works that are considered milestones in the development of the form.
    
    Sir Walter Scott is considered the father of the 19th century novel and the historical novel. [Remember, Defoe might be considered the father of the English novel, but if so, with his Journal of the Plague Year and Memoirs of a Cavalier, he might contend with Sir Walter Scott as the father of the historical novel.]

    To date, the only Scott novel I have read is Rob Roy, published the last day of 1817, although the author’s “copyright” is 1818.  I really enjoyed Rob Roy, perhaps because I had spent so much time between 2002 and 2004 in northern England (Yorkshire) just south of Scotland, and where much of action in Rob Roy probably took place.

    Juliet Barker, in her 1994 biography of The Brontës suggests that Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights follows Rob Roy to be a coincidence.

    “Modern” readers may prefer other Scott novels, but Robert Lewis Stevenson considered Rob Roy “the best of Sir Walter’s by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists.”

    See also Sir Walter Scott in How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
    
Victorian Literature
1830 – 1901
as defined by The Norton Anthology, English Literature
followed Romanticism

Queen Victoria (1819 – 1901) reign: 1837 – 1901
Victorian Age:  Industrial Revolution (social, economic, technology change)
Expansion of the British Empire; became the foremost Global Power of the time
Almost entirely of German descent
Last British monarch of the House of Hanover

Qualities associated with Victorianism: earnestness, moral responsibility, domestic propriety

Victorian literature: link between Romantic Period and 20th century literature

    Notable Victorian authors:  Brontë sisters, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker (Dracula), Philip Meadows Taylor, Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Oscar Wilde.

    William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1847 - 1848

    Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1920), the Wessex poems and Wessex novels


    In Britain, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), about the 1745 Jacobite uprising in support of Charles Edward Stuart, inaugurated the historical novel.  Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816), contemplating and satirizing life among a small group of country gentry in Regency England, initiated the highly structured and polished novel of manners.  A variant with a wider scope is William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847 - 48), which dissects and satirizes London society.

    The serialization of novels in various periodicals brought the form an ever-expanding audience.  Particularly popular were the works of Charles Dickens, including Oliver Twist (1839) and David Copperfield (1850).  Readers were drawn by Dickens’s sympathetic, melodramatic, and humorous delineation of a world peopled with characters of all social classes, and by his condemnation of various social abuses.  Further portraits of English society appear in Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, which scrutinize clerical life in a small, rural town, and George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and Middlemarch (1871 - 72), which treat the lives of ordinary people in provincial towns with humanity and a strong moral sense.  George Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Egoist (1879) are analytical tragicomedies set in high social circles.  The conflict between man and nature is stressed in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native (1878) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891).

    Although the great English novels of the 19th century were predominantly realistic, novels of fantasy and romance formed a literary undercurrent.  Early in the century Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) explores a tale of horror.  Later, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) each present imaginative, passionate visions of human love.  The Brontës wrote a total of seven published novels.

    Robert Louis Stevenson revived the adventure tale and the horror story in Treasure Island (1883) and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).  At the beginning of the 20th century, horror and adventure were combined in the novels of Joseph Conrad, notably Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902), both works achieving high levels of stylistic and psychological sophistication.

    Thomas Hardy advanced issues of sexuality; particularly notable was pioneer description of lesbianism in his first published novel, Desperate Reviews.

    Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800 – 1859), historian, loved the changes. Melancholy poet Matthew Arnold felt all the change in the Victorian period exhausted man. From The Norton Anthology, English Literature, Volume E, The Victorians:

Although many Victorians shared a sense of satisfaction in the industrial and political preeminence of England during the period, they also suffered from an anxious sense of something lost, a sense too of being displaced persons in a world made alien by technological changes that had been exploited too quickly for the adaptive powers of the humane psyche.

Victorian
Gothic Horror Novel


Dracula, Bram Stoker
some key dates:
Bram Stoker, Irish writer, 1847 - 1912
Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright, 1854 - 1900
Dracula published: 1897


Émigré Literature

(began in the late 18th century; extended into modern times)

    This is a minor fork down the road of storytelling but I stumbled across it in Judith Thurman’s biography of Isak Dinesen.  From page 260:  “As a young woman starting out in life, Tanne Dinesen had been caught in a typically Romantic predicament.  She was estranged from the values and milieu of her family; her inner life was at odds with her reality, and she felt cheated of that intensity which comes when one’s desire and experience are not in conflict. Her struggle for a passionate life between the ages of ten and seventeen – a struggle to ‘become herself’ – bears a close resemblance to the struggle of a whole generation of poets and artists who had grown up at the close of the eighteenth century, entered adolescence with Napoleon, believed his promises and in his example, and were left stranded in the 1820s feeling rootless, powerless, and betrayed.  They took refuge from their disappointment in nostalgia for the past, in dreams of adventure and rebellion, in eccentricity and fantastic stories, in opium, in the cult of the personality or in the forests of America, and they created what Georg Brandes called an émigré literature.  Some of them were actually émigrés from the ancien régime, and some were spiritual émigrés from their own disillusionment.

    “Their sense that society did not offer adequate scope for their desire and potential – for their humanity – split them and their work, and set the pattern for an entire century. Each successive generation of artists, from Lamartine to Ibsen, took a course it believed was necessary or virtuous or noble or inevitable, and also lamented:  the sacrifice of ‘life’ for ‘art.’”  See also exile literature elsewhere in this document.

19th Century

US: Transcendentalism (need to flesh out; complete this section)

A quick short book with an overview of Transcendentalism: American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever, c. 2007: Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne; peripherally the Peabody Sisters. 

 

I was in my "transcendental" phase and read a lot of these authors when we were living with Josh and Kiri in Belmont, MA, a suburb of Boston, when Josh was getting his MBA at Harvard.

1830’s: Concord, Massachusetts

• Emerson
• Margaret Fuller
• Peabody Sisters
• Henry David Thoreau
• Branson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Little Women; Elizabeth was “Beth” in Little Women
• Elizabeth Peabody Alcott: transcendentalism
• Nathaniel Hawthorne

Emerson, Ralph Waldo: from The Annotated Emerson, edited by David Mikics / foreword by Phillip Lopate:

• a giant of American literature; perhaps the greatest essayist, certainly one of our finest nonfiction prose writers; but seems to be forgotten; influence was less than deserved; I suppose to some extent, folks "outgrew" essays;
• "Emerson is our Shakespeare"; a born rebel;
• I've never "read" Emerson; I need to get to know him; I wonder what Harold Bloom has to say about him.
• went by his middle name, Waldo.
• Boston, MA; b. 1803; d. 1882 (age 78)
• major event in his life, the Civil War? 
• coming of age years: War of 1812
  
• led the Transcendentalist Movement (see below). New England, 1820s and 1830s; similar to Unitary church as taught at Harvard Divinity School
  

First American memoir and nature writing in one stroke: H. D. Thoreau, Walden

Memoir writing: Nathaniel Hawthorne (married Sophia Peabody, see below). 1804 - 1864.

Transcendentalism: we are born believers vs Calvin

• Calvin: we are born sinners
• Massachusetts: Boston, Salem, Concord
• Peabody Sisters
• Mary
• Sophia - married Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1809 - 1871 (61 years)
  
• Elizabeth
• She taught in her own private schools and was an assistant in Bronson Alcott's Temple School. In her contacts with Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendental circle in the 1830s, and as publisher of the famous Dial and other imprints, she took a mediating position once more, claiming the need for historical knowledge to balance the movement's stress on individual intuition. She championed antislavery, European liberal revolutions, Spiritualism, and, in her last years, the Paiute Indians. She was, as Theodore Parker described her, the Boswell of her age.
  
• Transcendentalism (movement led by R. Waldo Emerson): Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of a School
• Bronson Alcott daughters
• Anna Alcott:
• Louisa May Alcott: Little Women (Elizabeth was “Beth” in Little Women); 1832 - 1888 (55 years)
  
• Elizabeth Peabody Alcott: is she the daughter of Elizabeth Peabody-Bronson Alcott?
• Record of a School: based on Bronson Alcott’s school
• Wordsworth requested a copy

Herman Melville: 

 

Established writer; well received; 15 years younger than Hawthorne; halfway through Moby-Dick (The Whale), Melville reads House of Seven Gables and Scarlet Letter (one or both, can’t remember); very disturbed by Hawthorne’s “darkness.” Around chapter 23 (according to Carol Oates), Melville changes writing style completely in Moby-Dick. The critics hated the book; the public hated the book, and Melville “destroyed.” By Hawthorne — according to Carol Oates and Susan Cheever. 

The French and Russian Novels

    Major 19th-century French writers also produced novels in the romantic and realistic traditions.  Romance can be found in Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers (1844) and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1844), both of which are melodramatic and swashbuckling, terrifying and poignant.  Honore de Balzac’s Human Comedy (1829 - 47), on the other hand, is a series of novels that offer a realistic, if cynical, panorama of life in Paris and the provinces.

    In the 19th century Russian novelists quickly gained world reputations for their powerful statements of human and cosmic problems.  If Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (published in installments, 1865 - 69) is a God-centered novel, Feodor Dostoyevsky’s  Crime and Punishment (1866) can be considered a God-haunted one.

The American Novel

American novels in the 19th century were explicitly referred to as romances.  James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850), and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) -- the latter two heavily allegorical and containing supernatural elements -- properly belong in this category.  In the last decades of the century, however, a shift toward realism occurred.  Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883), a revival of the picaresque novel, is romantic in its Mississippi River setting but realistic in its satirical attack on religious hypocrisy and racial persecution. [See twentieth century for Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature.]
 

Great American Novel, definition: The "Great American Novel" is the concept of a novel that most perfectly represents the spirit of life in the United States at the time of its publication. It is presumed to be written by an American author who is knowledgeable about the state, culture, and perspective of the common American citizen. It is often considered as the American response to the tradition of the national epic.  (Huckleberry Finn is considered one of the first Great American Novels.)

Exile Literature

Dante, Conrad, Naboko, and countless others

Jewish Diaspora; Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
        The German Jews, from 1939 onward represent largest source of exile literature

According to Judith Thurman in her biography of Isak Dinesen describes émigré literature which sounds similar to exile literature.  See émigré literature elsewhere in this document.
 

I wonder if Brick Lane, by Monica Ali, elsewhere on this page, might be seen as a form of exile literature?

Fin de Siècle
 
Decadence, Artifice and Aesthetics

From wiki:  “In literature, the Decadent movement—late nineteenth century fin de siècle writers who were associated with Symbolism or the Aesthetic movement—was first given its name by hostile critics, and then the name was triumphantly adopted by some writers themselves. These "decadents" relished artifice over the earlier Romantics' naive view of nature (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Some of these writers were influenced by the tradition of the Gothic novel and by the poetry and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.
 

Oscar Wilde gave a curious definition: "Classicism is the subordination of the parts to the whole; decadence is the subordination of the whole to the parts." By this definition, Charles Dickens would qualify as decadent, [citation needed] because his "minor" characters often obscure the "major" ones—or at least are more interesting than them. For example, consider Mrs Sarah Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewitt.”
 

From the web: “Artifice implies both art and agency, rather than "artificiality" as the opposite of the natural. As aesthesis, art includes modes of making, doing, and seeing. Artifice, when understood as art as well as acting or performing, calls attention to the possibilities of inventing and imagining new forms of life through the intertwinement of the aesthetic and the political. Encompassing the imaginative, the technological, the theoretical, and the artistic, artifice as a term emphasizes the politics of art and the art of politics in the invention of life forms, both individual and collective.”

 

From wiki: “From the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics underwent a slow revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British thinkers emphasized beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and saw art as necessarily aiming at beauty.

Nineteenth Century Womanhood

Great French and Russian portrayals of anguished, transgressing 19th century womanhood, Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877), but few know the German entry in this field, Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, a dry, quiet little masterpiece.
-- Derbyshire, Unknown Quantity, p. 235

The Twentieth Century

Writers:

• Edith Wharton
• E.M. Forster, Howard’s End, 1910
• D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 1913
• James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922
• F. Scot Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1929

Also:

• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, our daughter Laura gave me a softcover copy after I kept losing my copy, LOL.
  
• Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934
• Anaïs Nin, House of Incest, 1936; Winter of Artifice, 1939; for quite some time I was in an "Anaïs Nin" phase -- many books and many biographies of her; most have been thrown away simply because I ran out of storage room.
  

The Twentieth Century:  The English Novel

The Georgian Period
1911 - 1936

    World War I and its attendant disillusionment with 19th-century values radically altered the nature of the novel.  In search of greater freedom of expression in English writers like E. M. Forster in Howard’s End (1910), D. H. Lawrence in Sons and Lovers (1913), and James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) described more explicitly than ever before the conflict between human intellect and human sexuality.  Joyce, along with Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915 - 38) and Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), carried Freud’s discovery of the unconscious into art by attempting to portray human thought and emotion through the stream of consciousness technique.

    Virginia Woolf, January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941:
        Her novels directly challenged the Bildungsroman

    James Joyce, February 2, 1882 – January 13, 1941:
    
    D.H. Lawrence, 1885 – 1930:
    
    Lytton Strachey introduced a new way of biography with The Eminent Victorians

The Twentieth Century:  The American Novel

    In the United States the profound postwar (WWI) dislocation of values is evident in such novels as The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a romantic bootlegger whose version of the American dream of success is shattered by a corrupt reality; The Sun Also Rises  (1926), by Ernest Hemingway, concerning a group of disillusioned expatriates in Europe who find meaning only in immediate physical experience; and The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner, about the disintegration of a once-proud Southern family.

    Note:  Hemingway completed The Sun Also Rises in six weeks, writing at his favorite restaurant in Montparnasse, La Closerie des Lilas. 
    
    For now, I will place Henry Miller in this category; I don’t know where else to put him.  Having read Tropic of Cancer (published 1934) it appears that it was writers like Henry Miller that paved the way for modern American novels and the 20th century movies in which frank language could be used.  It took someone to be the first with such frank language – language considered to be pornographic by many – but in Tropic of Cancer, Miller was describing things as they really were, and using language that he really used. He truly broke new ground, as far as I know.  One may argue that Henry Miller’s success was tied directly to encouragement from Anaïs Nin.

    Edith Wharton:  Edith Newbold Jones – “keeping up with the Joneses.”  When you get into your Edith Wharton stage, consider skimming Hermione Lee’s very long biography of Edith Wharton, then read Ethan Frome, and then read her autobiography, A Backward Glance.

[2019] From Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures:

I think Fitzgerald absorbed the techniques and the attitude of the emerging genre of hard-boiled fiction while he was intermittently living in and close to New York City from the late winter of 1919 to the spring of 1924. So much of the sturdy fabric of Gatsby — the criminal underworld, the tough-guy lingo, the obsession with the past, the violence, the doom-laden sense of fated-ness, the voice-over narration, the death by drowning — were staples of the hard-boiled tales, including the Alan Ladd Gatsby of 1949. The hard-boiled element in The Great Gatsby accounts for some of the dark magic of this very strange and un-American Great American Novel.

American Writers of the 20th Century

 

Hunter S. Thompson, in Hell’s Angels mentioned Nelson Algren. [A Walk on the Wild Side; which I discoverd in 2024 and began reading at that time.]
 

Nelson Algren, 1950’s writer:  “Novelist and reporter, poet and social conscience through fifty years of drastic change in America, including changes in literary fashion, Algren repeatedly located himself among those who have stood up for the accused and the down-and-out: a tradition in American literature that he saw extending from Walt Whitman and Herman Melville through Stephen Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Eugene O’Neill to Richard Wright, Jack Conroy and himself [this list should include Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, and later, Hunter S. Thompson].  

 

Insofar as he was a Chicago writer, Algren took his place among a group of socially concerned writers that included Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, James T. Farrell, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.”  [The “St.” in Edna’s name stands for Stephen.]

The Twentieth Century:  The French Novel

 

The greatest masterpiece of the 20th-century novel in France is widely acknowledged to be Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913 - 27), a monumental work in seven parts that is at once an inquiry into the meaning of experience, a study of the development of an artist, and a detailed portrait of life within a particular segment of French society.  Also important are Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) and Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), both fictional explications of existentialism.  

 

In the late 1950s there appeared in France the so-called new novel, in which traditional elements such as plot, characterization, and rational ordering of time and space are abandoned and replaced by flashbacks, slow motion, magnification of objects, and a scenario format, all of which produce a mutant -- the novel influenced by films.  New novelists include Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Nathalie Sarraute.

The Twentieth Century:  The Russian Novel

 

After 1917 Russian Revolution, much of the country’s literature reflected Marxist ideology.  Maxim Gorky was the leading exponent of social realism.  In 1933, Ivan Bunin became the first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  The novel in the Soviet Union either avoided offending the Communist party or, by reflecting a dissenting outlook, avoided publication in the USS.  Mikhail Sholokhov’s epic series about the Don Cossacks, including And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), met the first qualification; Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago (1957), about life in Russia from 1903 to 1929, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (1968) and First Circle (1968), both realistic, powerful accounts of life under Stalin’s regime, met the second and were published outside the Soviet Union.

The Twentieth Century:  The Mystery

    

The origin of the mystery is uncertain, but it can be traced back to ancient times.  As long as there has been crime, there has been mystery: http://library.thinkquest.org/J002344/History.html
 

The very first mystery / detective story was published in 1841 by Edgar Allan Poe.  The title of his book was The Murders in the Rue Morgue.  He inspired many others to write mysteries, including the famous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote about his well-known character, Sherlock Holmes.

The Twentieth Century:  The Modernists

The great modernists (per Carol Joyce Oates, New York Review of Books, August 13, 2015): Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner. Revolutionaries in technique, their subjects were intimately bound up with their own lives and their own regions; the modernist is one who is likely to use his intimate life as material for his art, shaping the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The Modernists: a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and how society was changing quickly in the first three decades of the 20th century. They were concerned about the loss of their “way of life” – a life of leisure, wealth, literature, art – although they only saw the literature and art as being important.

    Perhaps the best quick look at the Modernists is Stephen Klaidman’s Sydney and Violet, c. 2013. I read an advance copy.

    It seems Sydney and Violet Schiff (he was a wealthy average novelist who kept popping up during the birth of the Modernists; she as a remarkable editor) were instrumental in moving the Modernists along. The book revolves around the Schiffs, Marcel Proust, TS Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis.

    Violet’s favorite writer when she married Sydney was Henry James, p. 55.

    On page 46: “The key sociopolitical distinction the modernists made was between classical (conservative) and romantic (liberal). … Modernists of the Pound, Eliot, and Lewis school were classicists (human beings are limited animals with a fixed nature); many others were still romanticists (humanity’s inherent goodness justified liberty for all).” – paraphrased.

    [“The modernists were hardly the first to recognize the relationship between music and felicitous language. But they believed this relationship transcended beauty, that it was more than a pleasant sensation independent of meaning. Many of them believed that along with concrete images musical elements were indispensable for communicating feelings as precisely as possible. – p. 54 – 55]

    The literary journal for the modernists’: TS Eliot’s The Criterion: contributors were a Who’s Who of modernism: William Butler Yeats, Luigi Pirandello, Ezra Pound, EM Forster, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, WH Auden, Paul Valery, Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, Herman Hesse, and Hart Crane. (James Joyce about the only one not on the list.)  -- p. 94 of Klaidman’s book. [Elsewhere, I think Hart Crane is Harold Bloom’s favorite — see The Daemon Knows.]
    
    Klaidman says, p. 110, Joseph Conrad is “a godfather of modernism.”

    One of bits of trivia I learned about the Modernists from Klaidman was that they were obsessed with time (this explains, of course, Proust) but then another Scottish poet with an incredible story, Edwin Muir (1887 - 1959) who wrote in his diary, 1937 – 1939):

"I was born before the Industrial Revolution and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day's journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time." (Extract from Diary 1937-39.)

    Edmund Wilson, in his landmark and career-making book, Axel’s Castle [Commonplace Notes], writes about six Modernist writers, more specifically the Symbolists:

    W.B. Yeats
    Paul Valéry
    T.S. Eliot
    Marcel Proust
    James Joyce
    Gertrude Stein

    To Edmund Wilson’s list, add Virginia Woolf, as a modernist but not a symbolist.  I have not less than five books written by or about VW sitting on my desk, ready to be read (summer, 2006), including The Common Reader.  [By December, 2006, I think I had at least a dozen Virginia Woolf books (either books by Woolf or books about her or her works).  At this time, she and her works intrigue me the most. -- January 1, 2007] Woolf, herself, said she wanted to write in the style of Joyce; I forget whether she stated she could do a better job at Joyce than Joyce himself.  I will most likely come across that diary entry again some day.  [Lots of notes on Woolf in this Commonplace Book.]

    It is “impossible” to read Gertrude Stein’s first book, The Making of The Americans.  To some extent, I think she was “famous for being famous.”  She cultivated friendships with avant-garde writers and painters, especially Picasso.  She lived through two wars, WWI and WWII, and experienced WWII up close and personal by remaining in France when Americans were advised to leave.  Despite being female and Jewish, she survived the German Nazi occupation of France.  Apparently she was a great conversationalist, and a great speaker, and that’s probably what helped establish her myth.

    I had always been intrigued by the author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and a couple of good articles in The New Yorker got me started.   Again, I think Gertrude Stein is more interesting as a personality (“famous for being famous”) than as a writer.  [October 7, 2007:  a new Gertrude Stein biography has just been published – Two Lives. The author is Janet Malcolm and is it she who wrote three or four articles for The New Yorker.  So, although I don’t have the four New Yorker articles, her book is now available.]

    Another writer that might be considered a modernist, although she wrote more conventionally, is Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen.  She was definitely a feminist; whether her writings revealed that or not is something I  have yet to discover.

    Gorsky said that “Virginia Woolf speaks for the modern period.  Modernism is the most important aesthetic movement of the twentieth century. Along with such experiments as Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Faulkner, and Lawrence, Virginia Woolf is a prime representative of those so strongly affected by the tumultuous transition to the current [20th] century.”  According to Gorsky, at the time of Virginia’s birth, “Victorian England was becoming increasingly aware of the tumultuous change which introduced what today is called the modern age.  This period of upheaval witnessed frequently disruptive events in history and literature.  The breakdown of the traditional Western family and of class structure, the coming of a major economic depression, the accelerated shift from an agricultural to an urban and industrialized society – these general trends were supported or symbolized by specific occurrences, among them the death of Queen Victoria, in 1901, the flights of the Wright brothers in 1903, and in 1914 the great climax of the first World War.  At the same time, startling new ideas were being promulgated by Carl Jung in anthropology and psychology, by Sigmund Freud in psychology, by William James in philosophy and psychology, by Henri Bergson in philosophy, by Albert Einstein in the sciences, and by Sir James Frazer in anthropology.  However little or much the theories of these important thinkers may have been understood by their popular audiences, there can be no question of their impact.  For example, Jung’s work suggested strange and universal links among all people, an idea supported by Frazer’s study of myths which repeat themselves from one community to another, from one culture to another.  The explorers offered support for each others’ ideas, and the ideas themselves inflamed the curious and sensitive who learned of the new discoveries.”  Somewhere Gorsky stated that the transition from the Victorian Age to the Modern Age was as remarkable as the transition from the Dark (Medieval) Ages to the Renaissance Age. That is a remarkable statement if one stops to think about it a moment.

****

Concepts of interior monologue, James Joyce: A Literary Life, Morris Beja, p. 67.
    Concepts of “female writing,” James Joyce: A Literary Life, Morris Beja, p. 69.


    The Confessional Poets


The confessional poets (per Carol Joyce Oates, New York Review of Books, August 13, 2015): Robert Lowell, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, to a degree Elizabeth Bishop — rendered their lives as art, as if self-hypnotized. Of our contemporaries, writers as seemingly divers as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike created distinguished careers out of their lives, often retuning to familiar subjects, lovingly and tirelessly reimagining their own pasts as if mesmerized by the wonder of “self.”

The Twentieth Century:  The Obelisk Press

    Instrumental in publishing “modernist” writers in the first half of the 20th century when other publishers refused. 

    Reading the Wyndham Lewis biography (O’Keeffe) brought me to this via a Google search.

    The Guardian’s review of Neil Parson’s Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press, publication date: February 15, 2008

    "Neil Pearson’s book is a work of enthusiastic bibliographical scholarship, a brief biography, and a series of well-turned pen portraits. . . . Pearson is as adroit a writer as he is watchable an actor. . . . Everyone with an interest in literary history will enjoy Pearson’s narrative. His portraits of minor figures such as Marjorie Firminger, who had the misfortune to became infatuated with Wyndham Lewis, are particularly touching and sympathetic."—Guardian


    Book Description

Obelisk: A History of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press details the history of one of the most extraordinary—and controversial—publishing enterprises of the twentieth century. Publisher simultaneously of the infamous novels of the literary elite as well as low-budget erotica and “dirty books,” Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press published the likes of Henry Miller, James Joyce, Anaïs Nin, and D.H. Lawrence, alongside a lengthy list of censor-baiting eccentrics like N. Reynolds Packard, the New York Daily News’ Rome correspondent and the self-styled “Marco Polo of Sex.”
 
Here, for the first time, is the story of this remarkable venture, which captures some of the twentieth century’s most outrageous literary personalities and their often scandalous exploits, including the failed golf club society magazine run by Nin, Miller, and Lawrence Durrell and the tortured relationship between Obelisk author Marjorie Firminger and Wyndham Lewis. A richly illustrated cultural history of 1920s Paris, a fully-narrated bibliography of works published by an unforgettable literary institution, and a glimpse into the remarkable life of the Press’s creator, Jack Kahane, The Obelisk Press is a publishing event not to be missed by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century literary lives and letters.

The Twentieth Century:  The Surrealists

I don’t know much about this genre yet; it appears Anaïs Nin may be the prototype.  Could she be considered the Ur-Surrealist?  Zelda Fitzgerald (1900 – 1948) would definitely be considered a surrealist. Surrealism was a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s.

The Surrealists (per Carol Joyce Oates, New York Review of Books, August 13, 2015): the Surrealists considered the world a vast “forest of signs” to be interpreted by the individual artist. Beneath its apparent disorder the visual world contains messages and symbols — like a dream? Is the world a collective dream?

Surrealist artists —> photography. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Bruce Davidson, Garry Winogrand, the newly discovered Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus, (whose strategy was “to go where I’ve never been”), and numerous others.

The Twentieth Century:  Symbolism

 

See Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870 – 1930, (1931), which was a sweeping survey of Symbolism.  It covered Arthur Rimbaud, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (author of Axel), W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. 

(Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin came later in terms of publishing their first novels, in the mid- to late-1930’s.)

    
    I wonder if I need to include a section on Edmund Wilson.  Having read Dabney’s biography and having read summaries of that book and the life of Wilson on the web, it makes me wonder how I missed Wilson all these years.  And if I missed him, how many other people have missed him.

The Twentieth Century:  Naturalism

    While reading Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, I came across Stephen Crane. His first novel (novella) was Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. 

From wiki: 

 

“Stephen Crane’s Maggie is regarded as the first work of unalloyed naturalism in American fiction. According to naturalistic principles, a character is set into a world where there is no escape from one’s biological heredity. Additionally, the circumstances in which a person finds himself will dominate one’s behavior, depriving the individual of responsibility. Although Stephen Crane denied any influence by Emile Zola, the creator of Naturalism, on his work, examples in his texts indicate that this American author was inspired by French naturalism.”

Naturalism and Realism

Naturalism is a literary movement that emphasizes observation and the scientific method in the fictional portrayal of reality. Novelists writing in the natural mode include Emile Zola (its founder), Guy de Maupassant, Thomas Hardy, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris.

The Twentieth Century: Franz Kafka 

Kafka:

• 1883 – 1924
• Age 41, tuberculosis
• Published posthumously:
• The Trial, published by Max Brod
• The Castle, completed and published by Max Brod
• Amerika, published by Max Brod
• The introduction by Max Brod to Amerika is particularly enlightening. Max Brod specifically notes that Kafka was NOT a surrealist; he wrote his introduction in 1940.

The Twentieth Century:  Graphic Novels

    Numerous websites.  Graphic novels have probably been around since the 1940’s; considered by some to be of American origin.

The Twentieth Century:  Gonzo Journalism

    Of American origin, specifically:  Hunter S. Thompson, in the 1950’s, first with Hell’s Angels.
     
    I first read Hell’s Angels, and thus became acquainted with HST, in the summer of 2000, when I was living in my office at the 1st Medical Group, Langley AFB, VA, as I transitioned from commander at that hospital, to a staff position at the Air Intelligence Agency, Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX. I was incredibly depressed at this point in life.
   

The Twentieth Century: Theater

    Eugene O’Neill: four Pulitzer prizes; first (only?) American playwright to be awarded Nobel Prize (1936).

Everything changed with Eugene O’Neill in Provincetown, Cape Cod, 1916.

From Leona Egan: “Why this instantaneous approval of O’Neill? Most of the artists and writers were familiar with the leading playwrights of Europe, such as Strindberg and Ibsen, whose work had inspired O’Neill. O’Neill had adopted the Europeans’ melancholy and introspective themes to become America’s own apostle of woe.

Until O’Neill, no American dramatist had brought the new genre to home shores. He was the first to challenge the century’s materialism; the first to stage the lower-class idiom and life on an American stage; and the first to American playwright to work solely as an artist.

Many of the innovative techniques that he later employed in his major dramas – poetic use of light and sound, dialect, dramatic narrative – had their beginnings in his germinal play (Bound East for Cardiff), the one he selected for his premier.” Eugene O’Neill was only American playwright to win a Nobel Prize (1936).

The Twentieth Century:  Miscellaneous

    1.  I found the biography of Daphne du Maurier [Daphne du Maurier:  The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller] by Margaret Forster particularly interesting.

    Some highlights, maybe to be filled in later.

    I first came across Daphne du Maurier in my “classic movie” phase, and I happened to watch Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and was curious about the author of that book.

    Daphne was born in a literary family; her grandfather was a writer, and her father was a successful English playwright who plays were staged in London.

    She therefore had the name, the money, and the time, as well as the open doors of publishers, to become a writer.  She wrote much but is remembered most for Rebecca, a novel, which was made into a very successful movie by Alfred Hitchcock.  Rebecca was Hitchcock’s first movie made after he moved to the US.  He moved to the US because he felt Hollywood was where the action was, where one’s name would be made in filmmaking.

    Interestingly enough, one of her many short stories, The Birds was also made into a very successful movie by Alfred Hitchcock.

    She married a major in the British Army, Tommy Browning, who rose to the rank of Lieutenant General during WWII and who was responsible for merging the gliders and the paratroopers into the 1st Airborne Division.  Tommy Browning was the subject of a book and movie, A Bridge Too Far, in which the British were depicted as overstretching their men and failing miserably when trying to re-take Arnhem in WWII.  Browning, after the war, became the comptroller for Princess and then Queen Elizabeth.  Daphne was a close friend of the Royal family.

    Daphne is a minor author in the big scheme of things, but an important writer, nonetheless.

    2.  Monica Ali, Brick Lane

        a.  A recommendation from Colette Luscomb, Menwith Hill Station, when I told her about my newfound enthusiasm for literature

        b.  This contemporary novel was an exception in my reading program; before reading a whole lot of contemporary “stuff,” I want to read the “classics”

        c.  I see this book, soft cover, frequently featured at Borders.  It must be relatively well read among contemporary novels


Out of Africa, Karen Blixen, later Isak Dinesen.

Tim O’Brien: excellent novels about the Vietnam war, perhaps along the line of Ernest Hemingway. I’ve read Going After Cacciato and If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home; I think I might enjoy The Things They Carried.

Poetry:  A Definition

New Yorker, 6 Nov 06, Robert Gottlieb, quoting a 1950’s publisher:  “... a freshness and liveliness of feeling, a gift for imagery, and a power of expression that were quite exceptional -- in short, a poet.”

“Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.  Every idea in poetry is grounded in emotion.” Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, c. 1990, p. 18.

From wiki:  Louise Bogan, 1897 – 1970; an American poet who felt that “lyric poetry” if it at all authentic…is based on some emotion – on some occasion, on some real confrontation.”

Paul Dirac, one of the creators of quantum mechanics: “As a physicist I take what is complicated and make it simple. But the poet does the very opposite.”

Personal thoughts:  one cannot be sentimental in novels (there can be sentiment, but the author cannot be sentimental); however, poetry is all about emotion, including sentimentality.

Poetry: Miscellaneous

Edna St Vincent Millay: first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (The Harp Weaver)
    Love interest of Edmund Wilson, and others

Sylvia Plath: the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously (note: not just the first woman, but the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously); 1982; she died 1963

Poetry

 
Faulkner (1897 - 1962) -- near contemporary of my maternal grandmother, Reka Flessner

• (Contemporary of Hemingway (1899 – 1961)
• “On the Demands of Writing Short Stories”

Q:  Mr Faulkner, you spoke about The Sound and the Fury as starting out to write a short story and it kept growing. Well now, do you thin that it’s easier to write a novel than a short story?

A: Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in it and be excused for it. In a short story that’s next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can’t. I mean by that the good, short stories like Chekhov wrote. That’s why I rate that second – it’s because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There’s less room in it for trash. It’s got to be absolutely impeccable, absolutely perfect.

                            -- From Faulkner in the University
                            -- edited by Frederick Gwynn and Joseph Blotner

The Villanelle

    I think I recall seeing a reference to the villanelle earlier, but I explored this form of poetry more seriously after reading Sylvia Plath’s journals when she said she had written some villanelles.

    According to wiki, “A villanelle is a poetic form which entered English-language poetry in the 1800s from the imitation of French models. A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds. The first and third lines of the first stanza are rhyming refrains that alternate as the third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close. A villanelle is nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one concluding quatrain. 

Poetry

 

Sylvia Plath

    In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems. In 2006, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University discovered a previously unpublished poem by Sylvia Plath in the archives at Indiana University. She claims the 14-line Petrarchan sonnet, Ennui, was created from notes Plath wrote in a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Poetry

 

Stephen Spender

Spender. Born 1909. Autobiography at age 40; written 1947 – 1950 at Frieda Lawrence ranch overlooking Taos, New Mexico. A fellow classmate at Oxford (one year his senior):

WH Auden

WH Auden. Starting in his last year at Oxford and for three years spent six months of every year (1930 – 1933) in Germany. Saw rise of Hitler.

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood, a close friend. Enjoyed T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway. The afterword he wrote for his autobiography, World Within World, must be read before reading the autobiography. He wrote the autobiography when he was 84 years old; he died the next year. He felt his life was divided into two halves: pre-Spanish Civil War (late 1930’s) and post-Spanish Civil War. He was too young to fight, but old enough to remember WWI; he went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War; did not fight in WWII as far as I know. I’ve not read any of his poetry, only his autobiography.

ENGLISH ERAS

The eras:

• Elizabethan era: reign of Queen Elizabeth, 1558 – 1603, golden age of English history
• Jacobean era: reign of King James I (father of Charles), 1603 – 1642,
• [Shakespeare died about 1611]
• Jacobian: derived from Hebrew name Jacob, the original form of the English name James
• Caroline era: coincides with the Stuart period, 1603 – 1714;
• Coincides with reign of King Charles I, 1625 – 1642
• English Civil War, 1642 – 1651; Parliamentarians and Royalists
• English Interregnum, 1651 – 1660
• Began with the regicide of Charles I (1649; ended with restoration of Charles II, 1660)

LISTS

Book Lists

Other Lists

ESSAYS / RAMBLING THOUGHTS

RECREATIONAL READING:  Connecting the Dots
The Romantic Period:  1798 - 1832
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth) - Death of Göethe

May 24, 2005:

    I am currently reading many, many books -- voraciously reading as a way to stem off depression and a way to appear to be actively engaged in something.

    During the summer year between my junior year and senior year in high school I attended a summer course at St Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.  The course was on the Romantic Period.  At the time, I had no clue what the Romantic Period was all about.  Either I was a bit dense or the instructors (at home and at St Olaf) did not adequately explain what the Romantic Period was all about. [Looking back on this, my Williston high school English teacher who had offered me this opportunity to spend the summer studying the Romantic Period, could have spent some time with me, giving me special instruction on Romanticism.  Of course, I could have done that on my own, but it never occurred to me to do that.]

    I now understand that period very, very well, at least as JRR Tolkien would state, I have established my myth as regards this period.

    The Romantic Period is generally agreed to begin with Wordsworth’s publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and ended with the passage of the Reform Act in Parliament (England) in 1832 .  [ British poet whose most important collection, Lyrical Ballads (1798), published jointly with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped establish romanticism in England. He was appointed poet laureate in 1843.] [Göethe was born in 1749 and died in 1832.]

    Regardless of whether I understood any of the Romantic Period that summer at St Olaf -- and I don’t think I understood much -- the fact remains that the phrase “Romantic Period” stayed with me, not far from my daily consciousness.

    How ironic, then, about 40 years later, I end up in England, visiting the Brontë parsonage and museum, a product of the Romantic Period.  Earlier this year I went through my Brontë phase (discussed elsewhere) but through Brontë I have been drawn ever deeper into the Romantic Period.  I love connecting dots and each day it appears I find more dots to connect.

    Briefly this is where it stands.  The dots (I will leave it to the reader to connect the dots):   The St Olaf summer course on the Romantic Period, 1965.  Visiting the Brontë museum in Yorkshire, 2003.  Going through a Brontë phase in early 2004.  Reading Christopher Hitchen’s book review of a newly translated version of the Russian novel, A Hero in Our Time, by Lermontov.  Not understanding that review (Christopher Hitchens can be hard to understand) I did some background research on Lermontov and learned that Lermontov took on the mantle of Pushkin; Pushkin, who traced his growth and philosophy to Byron.  That prompted me to some background research on Byron to learn that he is one of the triumvirate that exemplifies the Romantic Period:  the triumvirate of Byron, Shelley, and Keats.  [Or as I now write:  byronshelleyandkeats, like lewisandclark, peanutbutterandjelly, byronshelleyandkeats.]

    The dots continue:  Mentioning to her that I enjoyed Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, a friend [Colette Luscomb] suggested Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  I completed my Austen phase -- not quite as expansive or as extensive as my Brontë phase, but I can always return to Austen -- but then somehow I learned of George Eliot.  I don’t recall how I learned of Mary Ann (Marian).  These three women (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and George Eliot) all published anonymously, and perhaps while reading one of their bios George Eliot was referenced.

    I asked Mary Corbin, San Antonio, 2005 who had her master’s degree in British Literature and taught British Literature most of her life, where to go next.  Among many works, she mentioned (and raved about Silas Marner by George Eliot).  I had read Silas Marner in high school but did not recall it.  I went to the half-price bookstore and bought a copy of Silas Marner but saw a thicker novel by George Eliot that intrigued me even more:  Middlemarch.  At the time of this writing, I am now halfway through that novel and enjoy it immensely.  [I read Silas Marner later.  To say that Silas Marner was incredible is an understatement.  My contemporaries remember Silas Marner being about “a creepy man” if they remember the story at all.  The story is so wonderful on so many levels.  I want to read it again; I now understand why people read great books over and over.]

    After background reading, going through my Brontë phase, and now my Austen phase, I now find reading these 19th century novels a bit easier.  For example, I learn that the term “Miss ______” designates the young woman as the elder daughter of the family, and the one who the parents are eager to marry off first.  Once she is married, the next oldest daughter becomes the “Miss _______.”

    While reading these books, I somehow came across Göethe.  Perhaps I remembered that I read some of his works (probably Faust) during that St Olaf summer.  I never understood a thing I read in Faust, I don’t remember any of it, and I certainly don’t know anything about Göethe. [Even now I have trouble understanding it; it seems it would help students immensely for professors to provide the background necessary to understand the story; the fact they do not, suggests that even professors have trouble understanding the story.  Interestingly, having read synopses of Faust and the biography of Göethe, suggests some interesting similarities between the Faust myth and Göethe himself.]  So, one day, while surfing the internet, I find that Göethe's “official biographer,” Eckermann published a book called Conversations with Göethe.  I ordered it, and find it intriguing.  Perhaps more on that later.  Interesting, Göethe died in 1832, the year that historians generally agree was the end of the Romantic Period.  Coincidence?  I’m not sure.  [In March, 2006, I began reading the 3-volume biography of Göethe by Nicholas Boyle.  Sebastian Vogt showed me the biography, in a chance visit, to his and Ruth Robinson’s home.]

    Göethe, in Conversations with Göethe, makes numerous references to Byron.  It appears that the star in front of Göethe is Byron.  Byron appears to be the brightest dot, and centered among all the rest of the dots.  I may save my “Byron phase” for last.

    Meanwhile, through unrelated reasons, I am reading Volume I (and the only volume published to date) of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis.  Throughout the Letters, C. S. Lewis references many of the same books I’m reading; early on (his high school years) there are many references to the Brontës and Jane Austen.  His letters, in a vague sort of way, help connect some of the dots.

    At the half-price bookstore, I also came across an old copy of Norton's Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2.  The preface and introduction do a great job providing further background to the Romantic Period, the Victorian Period, and the 90’s.

Trivia – Connecting the Dots

1.  Virginia Woolf – Septimus – Thomas Hardy

    Martin Seymour-Smith in his biography of Thomas Hardy mentions a “Septimus Brooke” in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I don’t recall, and can find no evidence, that Mr Brooke’s Christian name was ever provided in the novel. Either Martin Seymour-Smith made an error (unlikely; but no footnotes or bibliography to cross-check) or the serial of Middlemarch included Septimus as Mr Brooke’s first name.  Let’s assume Seymour-Smith has it right, that Mr Brooke’s first name was Septimus.

    Critics thought anonymously published novels by Thomas Hardy were in fact by George Eliot   [Thomas Hardy, 1840- 1928; George Eliot, 1819 – 1880].

    Leslie Stephen (1832 – 1904) was the editor of the magazine that published serializations by Thomas Hardy. In addition, Hardy himself stated, according to Seymour-Smith, that “his [Stephen Lewis] thinking had influenced him [Hardy] more than that of any other contemporary.” – p. 182, Seymour-Smith.

    Leslie Stephen was Virginia Woolf’s father.  It is not a stretch to think that Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) would have heard of “Septimus” from her father.

    In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa’s doppelganger is a shell-shocked man named Septimus.  The dots don’t connect perfectly but Septimus is an unusual enough name to suggest that there may be a connection between George Eliot – Thomas Hardy – Stephen Leslie – Virginia Woolf.