Story Telling 1

August 16, 2024: this page is no longer updated.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

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. [If I recall correctly, Virginia Woolf wrote a novel in the manner of The Symposium.]

Epic Sagas, Written

Beowulf: 1100 A.D.

• Kennings.

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.   

Icelandic Sagas

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

Thinking about the Icelandic sagas, some of the best English writing is from Ireland and Scotland.

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:

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 roday 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), Sir Henry Neville (1564 - 1615):

        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. Called ‘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 Great Vowel Shift? See discussion on YouTube.

The Novel

Don Quixote: 1605 -- right in the middle of Shakespeare's best writing.

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 (one of the best books I ever read) 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. I read Clarissa. (Wow, that was an achievement! Probably read it about 2004 while living in San Antonio.)

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 (1700s)

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. [This link broken. A new one, perhaps: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/who-were-the-bluestockings. March 16, 2024.]

 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.  

From wiki:

The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, appeared in four volumes on 8 May 1794 from G. G. and J. Robinson of London. Her fourth and most popular novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho tells of Emily St. Aubert, who suffers misadventures that include the death of her mother and father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle, and machinations of an Italian brigand. Often cited as the archetypal Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho appears prominently in Jane Austen's 1817 novel Northanger Abbey, where an impressionable young woman reader comes to see friends and acquaintances as Gothic villains and victims, with amusing results.

Also influenced Sir Walter Scott.

Transition to Romanticism

History:

“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

The period of 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. 20

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 (LEL:I have a biography).

Pre-Victoria

 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 (one of the best books you read).

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 Hanove

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

I never paid much attention to this era until we "lived" in Belmont, MA (suburb of Boston) for four years when Josh was at Harvard for two years, and then two years with a battery company (the beginning of the EV craze).

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; and, peripherally the Peabody Sisters

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

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

Transcendentalism: we are born believers vs Calvin

• Calvin: we are born sinners

Massachusetts: Boston, Salem, Concord
    Peabody Sisters
        Mary
        Sophia - married Nathaniel Hawthorne
        Elizabeth
Transcendentalism: Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of a School
    Bronson Alcott daughters
        Anna Alcott:
        Louisa May Alcott: Little Women (Elizabeth was “Beth” in Little Women)
        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 was “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 Womanhoo

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

Before reading any of these authors, read a wiki entry to get a feeling of what the author was all about.

For example:

• Edith Wharton is considered an American author, but in fact, lived her entire life in France, and is a French writer who happened to be born in America and wrote in English.

• Likewise, Edmund Wilson, list his entire adult life in England, and is more a British writer than an American writer.

The writers:

• Edith Wharton
• Edmund Wilson
• from The New York Times, December 30, 2023: Henry James best books unlocked. Lauren Christensen.
• 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

• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye,
• Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934 
• know the relationship between HenryMiller and Anaïs Nin
• Anaïs Nin, House of Incest, 1936; Winter of Artifice, 1939
• her life might be more interesting than her writing; her diaries are the root of her fame;
• early diaries were very tightly edited; much was left out
• if one reads her diaries, know whether they are the "old" diaries or the "new" diaries.
  

• Norman Mailer
  
• The Naked and The Dead; my notes on the blog; I first read it in 2024 for the first time in my life
  

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

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.] 

Hunter S. Thompson, in Hell’s Angels mentioned Nelson Algren. 

To the best of my knowledge, I never read anything by Nelson Algren. 

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 the 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 USSR.  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 her 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 [January 25, 1882], 

"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 Surrealist

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

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. 

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 innovate techniques that he later employed in his major dramas – poetic use of light and sound, dialect, dramatic narrative – had their beginnings in this 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

3. Out of Africa, Karen Blixen, later Isak Dinesen.

4. 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)
(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 think 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

 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. 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, 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.

The Spanish Civil War seems to be a big, big deal for writers -- think Hemingway, and now Spender.

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)