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I think I will stick out my neck and say No, there aren't!Now are there any contemporary writers, 20th Century on, that are in the class of the aforementioned writers of the previous century?
I think I will stick out my neck and say No, there aren't!Now are there any contemporary writers, 20th Century on, that are in the class of the aforementioned writers of the previous century?
Tolkien has an enormous rep, but how good is he really?
hahaha! I think we need a new smilie!Off with her head! Off with her head!
and there we need still another!! I'm training up my own flamingo to be an attack flamingo.I don't like to trust overmuch to my own judgment, but I do have to murmur just audibly over my flamingo mallet that I quite disagree. (Though I agree re: Tolkien, who, wonderful as he is, is not I think nearly the best writer of his time.)
Ha! I wish I could take up the cudgels here, but the truth is I know hardly any Wilde. I know The Importance of being Earnest, because we have a tape of the classic old 40's film version which the children used to be always playing, but hardly anything else. After a while that play annoyed me, funny and clever as it is, because the wit so often seemed to consist simply in saying whatever was the opposite of the truth.Jenny what do you think of Oscar Wilde? He didn't get brought up earlier, and I pulled something out by him this morning thinking about him. I think he is amazing -- but I personally have to be careful about flying too close to that sort of flame: his writing is too much like incredibly beautiful music that works too intensely on feelings or ideas, brought out of their proper place to meet it (Lewis describes something in the Pilgrims' Regress, with the man and his daughter -- I forget their names -- where the music plays, that reminds me of Oscar Wilde).
I'd like those so inclined to share who they believe are the greatest authors of the 19th Century, American and English.
American --- Twain
English --- Dickens
Agree?
If so, what are their greatest works?
If not, who are the greastest authors? and what are their greatest works?
I think I can say with my hand on my heart that I've got those two things separate in my mind, together with what I'd consider as a third, = "a good man" (unless that was what you meant by a "great man" - ambiguous or what?) - and maybe even a 4th, "someone who fully understands the truth about God and Man"But part of the difficulty in these discussions is that people don't always keep clear in their minds the difference between a "great author" and "an author who happens to be a great man" and what is perhaps most confusing, when it is "a great author who happens to be a great man".
Then do you think you and I may be applying the same, ultimately extra-literary criteria?Jenny, I think C. S. Lewis is a better poet than Eliot, and a better writer than Tolkien
Does anybody read 19th Century American and English literature?
Heidi:
Have you read anything by Alexander McCall Smith? Particularly his more recent works all began in newspaper serial form, and so are written in shorter chapters.
That might lend well to your current problems with concentration.
But then I'm reminded that this is supposed to be a thread about 19th Century authors. Pardon my digression.
I've always wondered (hoped) if it was the same with Dickens - that he was a deeper human being, but that he wrote to put food on his table and so had to please the crowds.
I've always wondered (hoped) if it was the same with Dickens - that he was a deeper human being, but that he wrote to put food on his table and so had to please the crowds.
Dickens suffered greatly at the hands of publishers who failed to pay royalties. He then hit on the idea of giving public readings as a way of raising funds for his family, and twice toured the US for that purpose. He also campaigned for copyright laws in response to the abuse he had suffered.
He then hit on the idea of giving public readings as a way of raising funds for his family, and twice toured the US for that purpose.
It's reported that he visited McKendree College in Lebanon, IL, which is close to my family's home. As I recall, he didn't have much good to say about the area! lol
Visit Lebanon, Illinois: Where Charles Dickens Walked - Associated Content - associatedcontent.com
David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page - Dickens in America
Sorry not to reply before... I've been horizontal with something fluey. I see I need to rethink (not for the first time!) It's just long enough since I read BNW for me to have lost sight of exactly what gave me that impression. Maybe just that the moral is a bit too obvious and pushed in the reader's face? But then again it may stem (as with Wilde) from a deep suspicion of Huxley's own ethical foundations. Up until my twenties at least, I read and admired so many essentially wordly authors, with a total lack of discrimination, that now (scanning them all narrowly for spiritual truth) I may be in danger of throwing some babies out with their bathwater.Jenny, Lewis was a very humble man . I do sincerely try not to make literary judgments on extra literary criteria, though I'm sure I don't always succeed. No, I meant that I think by literary standards, Lewis' poetry is quite good, and better than Eliot's, which is not so strict in form -- nor so lucid (nor was it was ever meant to be: he explained that the 'Notes on the Wasteland' were merely filler material and the whole thing was strung together without -- his own word -- a real 'structure'. I tend to think structure is an objective literary criteria . Lewis was not really a huge fan of Eliot's style of poetry -- he saw some aspects of it as part of a general demise, in which opinion I think he has been amply borne out by the evidence. Perhaps his poetry isn't recognised for its technical merit simply because he makes it look so easy -- he got the natural part down so well.
I think Brave New World is incredible. Huxley understood that the problem is with man's moral nature; and that happiness cannot function as the rule of morality -- and that freedom is not from moral constraint......it is quite a glaring light on the darkness of modern man, and it is certainly not vapid
Just to give this one a belated wee kick - since I see it's still open:Jenny, I was unsure about adding re: form and Eliot -- my thoughts are much more tentative in this regard (though my reactions are rather strong -- that it seems like there is also a moral question of form which enters into literary evaluation -- I don't think literary merit is divorced from moral considerations. Substance can't be separated from form; and I think fundamentally art celebrates what is. I think works of 'uncreation' are evil (I don't think I'm easily angry; but I have been angry with some works of art because they slap people with chaos and ingratitude: they celebrate formlessness and the void. However much work went into them, I cannot believe there is so much meritorious skill involved in reducing intelligible things to chaos, as in calling intelligible things out of it. & however morally tainted in other ways many works of art are -- as with Hardy -- I think the joy or wonder of creation implicit in them still makes them a fundamentally positive thing -- which is why I can enjoy many things the 'moral' of which I disagree with; I just can't enjoy smears of paint that look like vomit passed off as making something new out of the old world.)
-I agree 100%I don't think literary merit is divorced from moral considerations. Substance can't be separated from form;
This is really the problem, as I see it. It does - but it shouldn't! It should only celebrate what is Godly, and lovely, and of good report. An awful lot follows from that of course. But mainly...I don't think it's enough to avoid the out-and-out satanic. A writer like Hardy who uses his God-given skill to commingle beauty with godlessness is in some ways worse, because so much more seductive. (don't mind my bossy opinionativeness....and NB I'm very inconsistent in practising the principles I'm so ready to lay down)and I think fundamentally art celebrates what is.
'There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude. That light of the positive is the business of the poets, because they see all things in the light of it more than do other men. Chaucer was a child of light and not merely of twilight, the mere red twilight of one passing dawn of revolution, or the grey twilight of one dying day of social decline. He was the immediate heir of something like what Catholics call the Primitive Revelation; that glimpse that was given of the world when God saw that it was good; and so long as the artist gives us glimpses of that, it matters nothing that they are fragmentary or even trivial; whether it be in the mere fact that a medieval Court poet could appreciate a daisy, or that he could write, in a sort of flash of blinding moonshine, of the lover who “slept no more than does the nightingale”. These things belong to the same world of wonder as the primary wonder at the very existence of the world; higher than any common pros and cons, or likes and dislikes, however legitimate. Creation was the greatest of all Revolutions. It was for that, as the ancient poet said, that the morning stars sang together; and the most modern poets, like the medieval poets, may descend very far from that height of realization and stray and stumble and seem distraught; but we shall know them for the Sons of God, when they are still shouting for joy. This is something much more mystical and absolute than any modern thing that is called optimism; for it is only rarely that we realize, like a vision of the heavens filled with a chorus of giants, the primeval duty of Praise.'
(Confessions, Book 2)For there is an attractiveness in beautiful bodies, in gold and silver, and all things; and in bodily touch, sympathy hath much influence, and each other sense hath his proper object answerably tempered. Worldly honour hath also its grace, and the power of overcoming, and of mastery; whence springs also the thirst of revenge. But yet, to obtain all these, we may not depart from Thee, O Lord, nor decline from Thy law. The life also which here we live hath its own enchantment, through a certain proportion of its own, and a correspondence with all things beautiful here below. Human friendship also is endeared with a sweet tie, by reason of the unity formed of many souls. Upon occasion of all these, and the like, is sin committed, while through an immoderate inclination towards these goods of the lowest order, the better and higher are forsaken, -- Thou, our Lord God, Thy Truth, and Thy law. For these lower things have their delights, but not like my God, who made all things . . .
Does anybody read 19th Century American and English literature?
But seriously, Ivan, you mentioned 20th Century - I have studied both 19th and 20th and in my opinion the standard is much lower in the 20th.
However, to name some names:
Phillip Larkin
Seamus Heaney
Anton Chekov (ok, not English or American)
Daphne Du Maurier (Rebecca IS my favourite novel of all time)
Phillip K Dick
TS Eliott
I will also say that some 20th century literature I had to study was utterly vile, amoral and blasphemous, and I took pleasure in literally tearing several paperbacks apart as soon as I knew I had passed. I could have sold them on - but I couldn't live with giving them any further circulation.