(np) John Buchan: Q becasue of Alice

[alice wellintown]

Twains works are loaded up with Romance; his interest in European
Medieval Romance is well documented in the critical literature.
Adventure seems the thing he can never do without; he is no Henry
James. Although HF includes a satirical treatment of romance,
including Don Quixote (a book he admired), and although Don Q is taken
up as a model by Tom to the level of an absurd and cruel game that
nearly causes the death of the hero Jim, Twain's use of Romance in HF
as elsewhere is, like so much in his work, full of apparent
contradictions. These can be ironed out once we set Twain in the
American tradition.


On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> Whenever I hear Sir Walter Scott's name (or read it) my mind goes
> straight to the image of the half-sunk wreck Huck and Jim come across
> on their way down the river. My image is, yes, of a boat run aground
> in the shallows. That does not mean  I think Romanticism is stuck in
> the shallows generally, only that old Sam Clemens left a pretty strong
> image of a writer too fat for the passage he attempted to negotiate.
> Scott's works incline to lovely prose and imagery, with a strong
> heroic presence and "nobility", for whatever that word is worth, but,
> in terms of real, social worth, they incline to entertainment value,
> with little real heritage to pass along.
>
> I'll have to read Buchan to learn more about his perspective on Scott.
>
> On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 7:26 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Buchan wrote a lot about Sir Walter Scott. Great creator of Romance s....
>> Buchan's fictions were Romantic at base.....
>>
>> Melville, Pynchon and others wrote, write, American Romance.
>>
>> Scott hasn't lasted. (Irving Howe wrote a good essay on why). He
>> was one of the few who praised Austen, who has. her realism is
>> still reality. (?)
>>
>> So Q, if Romance does not contain its own self-criticism and/or if
>> Romance does not go deep---metaphysically deep; to historical
>> origins deep; to deep social and historical satire---does it inevitably
>> end up dated via shallowness?
>>
>>
>> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>> To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Friday, November 4, 2011 8:20 PM
>> Subject: (np) John Buchan
>>
>> ok, he's in the preface to Slow Learner, and everybody's seen the 39 Steps
>>
>> I was thinking of looking at some of his books.
>> Pynchon said some are even better than 39 Steps.
>> The guy was governor general of Canada!  I didn't know that.
>>
>>
>>
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> --
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
> creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
> trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
> of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
> than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
>