(np) John Buchan: Q becasue of Alice

[alice wellintown]

The American Romance

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2010-07/Founding_Novelist.html


On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 4:26 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "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
>>
>