Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #literatureinenglish, aggregated by home.social.
If/when you have a moment, could you share your thoughts on Gertrude Stein in general and "Tender Buttons" in particular?
I haven't been yet to that exhibition I mentioned to you a little while ago, but I have been revisiting "Tender Buttons" and thinking about Stein.
#GertrudeStein #TenderButtons #Modernism #AmericanLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #USLiterature #QueerLiterature
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Knowing that you stan Stein, I also thought of you when I saw this announcement:
I'll be going to see this exhibition in a couple of weeks. I wonder what it will say, or not say, about her politics in general and her friendship with Bernard Faÿ in particular.
#Modernism #GertrudeStein #USLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #USExpatriates #BernardFaÿ
I have first hand acquaintance with the works of eight of the ten authors thought by 1936 readers of "The Colophon" to be writers of books that would be esteemed as classics long into the future. This familiarity of mine is not unusual; most educated Americans will have at least some knowledge, even if only at second hand, of Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Robert Frost.
Dreiser might be less well known. In spite of his importance in US literary history, his themes will seem distant and dull to many readers today and his prose wordy and clumsy.
I've never read anything by the popular historian James Truslow Adams, although I was aware that he coined the phrase "The American Dream" for a 1931 book.
George Santayana has fallen into obscurity today outside the ranks of historians of American philosophy. I have read a little by him; I should read more. My guess is that he earned his place in this poll not on account of his philosophical works but by virtue of his 1935 bestseller "The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel", which I have not yet read but is on my To Be Read List.
James Branch Cabell achieved fame with his comic fantasy "Jurgen" in 1919. Subsequently he churned out a large number of fantasies, historical novels, essays, and poems, but his popularity was waning by the 1930s. I have never read anything by him and have no interest in doing so.
I've read a lot of Sinclair Lewis, who topped the poll. He was a witty observer not only of the peculiarities of America life in the early decades of the 20th century but also of forces and habits that continue to shape the culture of the USA. Nor was he simply a chronicler of social mores; his best novels, like "Dodsworth" and "Arrowsmith", while deeply rooted in US culture, also speak to human dilemmas and passions that transcend the time and place of their setting.
I would like to echo the article's question "Who would you put on a list of authors read today who will still be read into the year 2080 and beyond?"
I can't give an informed answer because I do not read that much contemporary literature, so I am eager to see who might be nominated by those better read in this area than I am.
#Literature #AmericanLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #20thCenturyLiterature #21stCenturyLiterature #1930s #Classics #LiteraryReputation
BUtterfield 8 -- John O'Hara
Although there has been small revival of interest in John O'Hara in recent years, as can be seen by the 2019 appearance of a Library of America edition of four of his novels, he is never going to regain the attention he enjoyed in the thirties, when he was a regular in the "New Yorker" and both the 1934 "Appointment in Samarra" and the 1935 "BUtterfield 8" were best sellers.
Amongst the many reasons for this decline is his stylistic weakness compared to his now more highly esteemed contemporaries; his prose cannot match the lyricism of Fitzgerald, the allusive brevity of Hemingway, or the distinctive modernist idioms of Faulkner or Dos Passos.
Nevertheless, his ability to create convincing dialogue is one of the strengths of "BUtterfield 8" and his acute ear is of a piece with the other observational powers at work is this novel of New York in the early years of the Depression. O'Hara had a sharp eye for the markers of social class and status, racial and ethnic prejudice, and the power of alcohol with Prohibition still in force. Notably, an unprurient candor about sex might surprise the reader of today and probably accounted at least in part for strong sales in the past.
The novel, revealing as it is about the Depression and the cafe society component of the metropolitan middle classes, is more than a document in social history. At its heart is the search of its young protagonist Gloria Wandrous for both love and freedom and her uncertainty about what these might be. This search and uncertainty are shown at work in her adulterous and abusive relationship with the older businessman Weston Liggett and the unconsumated yet deeper romance with commercial artist Eddie Brunner. She never finds what she is looking for, and these unresolved tensions are perhaps mirrored in the novel's conclusion, which has struck many critics as clumsily unsatisfying.
Although I recognize the literary weakness of the abrupt ending of the narrative, I found myself impressed by "BUtterfield *" both in regard to its social observation and psychological insight. I would recommend it to readers with an interest in the twenties and thirties and to those who would like to understand better how the rapidly changing role of women was portrayed at that time.
Many years ago I enjoyed "Appointment in Samarra". Now that I've read "BUtterfield 8", I'm going to give some of his short stories, his 1938 "Hope of Heaven", and 1940 "Pal Joey" a try.
#Books #BUtterfield8 #JohnOHara #Fiction #Novels #Realism #AmericanLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #1930s
The Man with the Golden Arm -- Nelson Algren
I'd place this 1949 novel of gamblers, drug pedlars, and other members of the Chicago white ethnic lumpenproletariat in the direct lineage of midwestern naturalists like Theodore Dreiser and James T Farrell. I was also reminded at times of the sentiment and squalor combinations of Steinbeck and Dickens.
In spite of the work offering neither the "proletarian" radicalism of the early thirties nor the later Popular Frontish CIO Americanism of works like Bell's "Out of this Furnace", "The Man with the Golden Arm" is not an entirely apolitical work. Politics drives the plot towards its conclusion as the protagonist Frankie Machine finds himself doomed by a local election fuelled crackdown on crime. Less overt but perhaps more powerful is the continual theme of assets and social connection always trumping fairness, love , and dreams; even before the police net closes in on Frankie, we know that he will never be able to escape the world of drugs and card hustling, become a drummer, and set up with Molly Novotny because he is a nobody who owns nothing.
I can't say I loved the novel, finding as I did much of the criminal argot dialogue and the urban lyricism tiresome at times, but it stands nevertheless as a useful corrective to those understandings of the postwar USA cast entirely in terms of boom and suburbia.
Sadly, Algren made very little from the Frank Sinatra starring film adaptation.
#Books #TheManWithTheGoldenArm #NelsonAlgren #USLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #20thCenturyLiterature #Chicago #Naturalism
Robert Graves -- Good-Bye To All That
This 1929 autobiographical work is indispensable for an understanding of how many British dealt with the memory of the Great War in the years that followed.
The accounts of the chaos and confusion of military operations were vividly narrated, but did not come as a great surprise to me. I was more taken aback by the stories of allied mistreatment of German prisoners, with Graves picking out Canadian and Australian soldiers as especially notable for this behaviour.
"Good-Bye To All That" is rich with memorable anecdote and imagery, such as tommies using machine gun cooling water to make tea, and incidents of the wartime absurd, like the story of Graves mistakenly being reported as dead, then receiving a communication from his commanding officer: “I cannot tell you how pleased I am you are alive.”
Nevertheless the horror of the war is never forgotten: “The first dead body I came upon was Samson’s. I found that he had forced his knuckles into his mouth to stop himself crying out and attracting any more men to their death. He had been hit in 17 places.”
#Books #RobertGraves #GoodByeToAllThat #Autobiography #BritishLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #FirstWorldWar #WW1 #History
Anthony Powell -- Afternoon Men
One might think of Anthony Powell as a quintessentially British novelist, so the importance of the USA in his first novel, the 1931 "Afternoon Men", might come as a surprise.
The USA makes itself felt both in the novel's content and in its style. The publisher Scheigan is the stereotyped American abroad, while the USA itself is mentioned continually throughout the novel as a place where people can go to either make or hunt fortunes. Making up the bulk of the text, the clipped dialogue of the novel seems indebted both to Hemingway and the new American popular culture form, the talkie.
I also noted Powell's depiction of Jews in the novel. Although "Afternoon Men" does not promote antisemitism as a central theme, a current of unfriendly suspicion is nevertheless detectable.
Although the novel was published in 1931, the social, romantic, and occupational misadventures of the mostly youthful characters smacks of the decade preceding the great depression. Comparing it to Waugh's "Decline and Fall" and "Vile Bodies", I found the comedy less broad but more perceptive about British society and individual ambition and romantic aspiration.
Decades have passed since I last read "A Dance to the Music of Time". I wonder how that cycle would strike me now that I am acquainted with Powell's 1931 novel of comedy and class.
#Books #AfternoonMen #AnthonyPowell #Novel #BritishLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #20thCenturyLiterature #1930s #1920s #Antisemitism
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33972802
I want to read Ambler's 1939 "The Mask of Dimitrios" not only as part of my contuing quest to make sense of the twenties and thirties but also because of its reputation as a first rate novel of espionage.
#Books #EricAmbler #TheMaskOfDimitrios #LiteratureInEnglish #BritishLiterature #Espionage #Thriller #1930s
https://tcupress.tcu.edu/9780875659695/
I'm very much looking forward to the reissue of this hard to find novel of 1940.
#Books #TheInheritors #Novel #Texas #AmericanLiterature #1930s #FortWorth #LiteratureInEnglish #PhilipAtlee #JamesYoungPhillips
https://c.im/@jemmesedi/116587701508426633
I finished "Lonesome Dove" a while ago but did not get round to posting about it.
McMurtry wrote this with an intent to demythologize the western and give the reader an unflinching tale of harsh people in hard times instead.
He did not really succeed, as he ended trapped by the "epic" structure of the Texas to Montana cattle drive and an often insufficiently critical approach to embedded conventions regarding ethnicity and gender. To exemplify the latter problem , consider the sadistic Blue Duck who fits into a long line of racist portrayals of American Indians, or Lorena Wood, who could not be a more stereotyped "whore with a heart of gold".
Two leading male characters show how the "Lonesome Dove " remains locked in the narrow conventions of genre. Woodrow Call and "Gus" McCrae, sometime Texas Rangers and joint owners of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, provide contrasting modes of male leadership. As such, and in their relationships with each other, younger cowboys, women, and their own ageing selves, they illustrate a tendency of the western as a genre to treat the West not as a real inhabited region in North America but rather as a stage setting for white males to explore their own anxieties and white Americans in general to fret about "the closing of the frontier".
I'm sure that a student of the Reagan era could show how "Lonesome Dove " exemplifies aspects of US culture of the 1980s; I don't have either the energy or the inclination to undertake that task myself.
#Books #LonesomeDove #LarryMcMurtry #Western #USLiterature
#1980s #Texas #LiteratureInEnglish #AmericanWest #Gender #Fiction #Novel
Earlier this evening I enjoyed the satisfaction of coming to the end of a book I enjoyed very much, Dawn Powell's 1948 novel "The Locusts Have No King".
I've posted about this author before; this is the fifth novel of hers I have read, and it impressed me as possibly the best so far. Beneath the sharp observation of literary New York and mid-century Manhattan mores lies a tale full of insight about the relations between men and women. The author provides plenty of amused skepticism about what we tell ourselves and others about our motives and hopes in the ups and downs of love and friendship, but this skepticism never lapses into a shallow cynicism about human nature. Instead, as happens with a comedy at its best, we are left both amused and moved.
Andrew Wheeler had a slightly different but thoughtful take on the book here:
https://antickmusings.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-locusts-have-no-king-by-dawn-powell.html
As Wheeler notes, "The Locusts Have No King" is not a book for everyone; you must have a taste for adult satire that is never coarse but which can sting at times. If you are, or aspire to be, that adult, I would strongly recommend that you hurry along to your library or bookshop now!
#Books #DawnPowell #TheLocustsHaveNoKing #Fiction #Novels #AmericanLiterature #USLiterature #NewYork #LiteratureInEnglish #1940s
One of my greatest pleasures recently has been discovering the writing of Dawn Powell.
I've just finished her 1942 novel "A Time To Be Born", which combines both her first hand understanding of the journalistic and literary New York of her time with a midwesterner's skeptical amusement at metropolitan self advancement and snobbery.
The novel also provides insights into American women's distinctive struggles with ambition, competition, and love in the opening years of the Second World War.
#Books #Fiction #DawnPowell #USLiterature #20thCenturyLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #Novel
https://marissavivian.substack.com/p/hidden-voices-004-dawn-powell
James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" impressed me both for its exploration of love, sex, and sexual identity and for the skill with which the author has the narrative unfold; I was gripped from beginning to end.
Although the protagonist is white, I know that some critics believe that the theme of race is obliquely present by virtue of the salience of various kinds of minority identity throughout the novel.
Quite aside from it being a "good read", I would recommend it to anybody interested in the literary treatment of bisexuality.
Expatriation also figures as an important theme. These words hit home with this migrant:
>> You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back. <<
"Home", of course, can be more than a geographical location.
#Books #GiovannisRoom #JamesBaldwin #Fiction #AmericanLiterature #USLiterature #AfricanAmericanLiterature #QueerFiction #LiteratureInEnglish #Sexuality #Bisexuality #20thCenturyLiterature #1950s #Homosexuality #Gay #Expatriates #Migrants
Orwell's 1936 novel sees Gordon Comstock quit advertisement copywriting to work on his poetry and maintain his integrity in the face of the "money god".
Comstock's rebellion, like that of Winston Smith a decade later, ultimately fails.
In addition to being struck by the parallels between Comstock's life under British capitalism in the 30's and Smith's under Ingsoc in Airstrip One, I was also impressed by Orwell's sharp descriptions of the indignities of genteel poverty.
#Books #KeepTheAspidistraFlying #GeorgeOrwell #BritishLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #Novels #20thCenturyLiterature
I finished Nabokov's "Pnin" last night.
What a delight it was! Funny, clever, and oddly moving.
I would recommend getting hold of the Everyman's Library edition, as the introduction by David Lodge is both informative and perceptive.
#Books #Pnin #Nabokov #Fiction #Literature #AmericanLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #20thCenturyLiterature #CampusNovel #DavidLodge
I don't want to flood your inbox, but I did want to thank you again for the Barbara Kingsolver recommendation.
I have just finished "The Bean Trees", which made a delightfully refreshing contrast to the last novel by a US author I read, Elmore Leonard's "Out of Sight"; see my comments on Leonard here: https://c.im/@jemmesedi/115323499218156545
Even though "The Bean Trees" was published 37 years ago in 1988 -- the year that Trump really started Trumping -- I was pleasantly reminded as I read it of how the USA is so much more than the simplistic caricature of a country presented by MAGA. The book conveys a vivid sense of various US places - Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona -- and the diversity of these places' inhabitants. I also found it refreshing to read a novel steeped in progressive values that was without a trace of the graduate seminar room or East/West coast hipsterism. I liked the way that Kingsolver incorporated surprises in the narrative and humour too; I laughed out loud at times. All in all, an enjoyable but also thought provoking read.
I think I'm going to put "The Poisonwood Bible" on my TBR list.
Thanks again - should I be thanking Dawn too?
#BarbaraKingsolver #Books #USLiterature #AmericanLiterature #TheBeanTrees #Fiction #Novels #LiteratureInEnglish
Renata Adler's 1976 novel "Speedboat" enjoys a cult following amongst MFA types.
I'm not an MFA type myself, but I thought I should give it a try.
If you're looking for a gripping story, this is not the book for you. It's virtually plotless, being composed of a series of episodes, observations, and micronarratives in the life of a young NYC based journalist. Certain characters recur, but the chronology is left unclear.
One does get a feel for New York in the seventies as experienced by a fairly privileged young white woman -- Elaine's, rats, vagrants in the apartment house vestibule, no show faculty at the state university,....At times, I found myself laughing at scenes from parties and metropolitan encounters.
I wonder if this would be good novel to study if one wanted to broaden one's understanding of the meaning of literary postmodernism. "Speedboat" exemplifies a formal experimentation distinctive from that of the modernist novel of the the first half of the twentieth century but which is also free of the metafictionality and self reference that often are taken as definitive of the postmodern.
#RenataAdler #Speedboat #USLiterature #Books #Fiction #LiteratureInEnglish
I'd never read any V.S. Naipaul, so I decided to give what is supposed to be his most important work a try.
I didn't love it, even though the writing conveyed the sights, sounds, and smells of twentieth century colonial Trinidad so effectively. I also got more of a feel for the life of the Indian diaspora in the British empire, even though I found the narrative of one member of that diaspora's search for a place of his own amidst career and family troubles less absorbing than I had hoped.
When I had finished, I put "A House for Mr Biswas" aside and felt puzzled. Why does this book enjoy such a stellar reputation?
#Books #VSNaipaul #AHouseForMrBiswas
#LiteratureInEnglish #Trinidad
Alice Munro's "Lives of Girls and Women" impressed me.
Whether one thinks of it as a set of linked short stories or as novel, the book clearly belongs to that line of North American fictions representing slices of small town life of which Sherwood Anderson's "Winesberg Ohio" is a notable early example.
Munro's work includes sharp observations of female friendship, mother daughter relations, and the limits of provincial cultural life. One story depicts a middle aged man engaged in unsolicited sexual display in front of the young female protagonist; this scene is at once utterly grotesque and totally unforgettable.
I'd strongly recommend "Lives of Girls and Women" . Unfortunately, you will almost certainly not be as lucky as me when I picked up my Penguin copy for a dollar!
#Books #ShortStories #AliceMunro #CanadianLiterature #Fiction #NorthAmericanLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish
I recently read Tillie Olsen's 1960 novella "Tell Me a Riddle".
An aging Jewish woman with cancer, her sense of having lost her self through years of tending to others, endless arguments between spouses, poverty, death...it all sounds so bleak, doesn't it?
Yet such is Olsen's sensitivity to the sound of speech, the complex intertwining of resentment and attachment, memories of migration and hope, and sheer emotional honesty that I put down the book feeling revitalised.
Don't approach the book as "just" a piece of women's literature, working class writing, or Jewish literature; it's all of those, and (not "but") from these skeins Olsen weaves a tale for us all.
#USLiterature #AmericanLiterature #LiteratureInEnglish #FeministLiterature #WorkingClassLiterature #TwentiethCenturyLiterature #JewishLiterature #Novella #TillieOlsen #TellMeARiddle
I recently enjoyed Edith Wharton's "The Custom of the Country". With its settings in the US and France, this 1913 work bears some thematic resemblance to the international novels of Henry James. Wharton's work, though, does not foreshadow the modernist use of stream of consciousness as does the later work of James; stylistically, Wharton is working with in the tradition of realism, so that one can associate her with William Dean Howells as much as with James.
Writing in this realist tradition and, as one might expect from the author of a pioneering work on interior decoration, scrutinizing in detail dwellings and their contents, Wharton narrates the merciless struggle of midwestern transplant to New York Undine Spragg for upward social mobility. Architecture, furnishings, decor, dress, and accessories not only reflect social and psychological states but also serve to pivot the plot.
I suspect Americans and Europeans, men and women, and young and old will react variously to the novel. I was impressed by its shrewd observation of manners and mores, impressed by its wit and irony, and gripped by the narrative of the odious protagonist's irrepressible social ascent. I remember reading somewhere that "Downton Abbey" creator and beneficiary of a Conservative title hand-out Julian Fellowes was rooting for Undine all the way; that tells us as much about Tory peers as Wharton's work.
I bought the Penguin Classics edition, pictured in this post. I recommend purchasing another edition, as pages fell out of this brand new book as if it were a cheap pulp paperback of old. What a disappointment!
#TheCustomOfTheCountry #EdithWharton #Realism #Books #AmericanLiterature #USLiterature #Novels #Bookstodon #LiteratureInEnglish #PenguinBooks
#InternationalNovels
I've just finished Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy", which came to me strongly recommended and which I know enjoys a cult following.
That cult won't count me as follower, I'm afraid. On the whole, I did not enjoy the almost 600 pages of rambling digressions, learned satire, and bawdy wordplay. At times I felt I was stuck with the Georgian equivalent of that tiresome elderly relative who insists on re-enacting sketch after sketch of Monty Python. Readers who enjoy "Don Quixote", Rabelais, and postmodern metafictionality will probably derive more pleasure from the book than I did.
Nevertheless, it wasn't all a joyless slog. Like so many readers down the years, I was taken with Uncle Toby, who combines an eccentric passion for military fortifications with a winning kindness; after catching a fly, he releases it saying "I'll not hurt thee, go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? —This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me".
As well as enjoying some of Sterne's play with ideas about determinism, I was charmed by the narrator's encounter in rural Languedoc with a young woman who has him join a dance with her companions. This delightful pastoral scene made me think I might enjoy Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey".
#Books #Bookstodon #TristramShandy
#LiteratureInEnglish #Literature
#LaurenceSterne #18thCenturyLiterature
Image:Laurence Sterne -- Sir Joshua Reynolds -- 1760 -- National Portrait Gallery, London -- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
« He wanted to measure time by the growth of trees »
The Killing Hills, Chris Offutt
#reading #booksmstodon #books #LiteratureInEnglish #naturewriters