NP much but a little. Chicago World's Fair

[Mark Kohut]

you've led me to a small bit of interesting research--to me at least. the
reception of Bartlby at the time of publication.

It was first published in Putnam's Magazine, a magazine founded in the wake
of the overwhelming success of the Harper
Brothers' magazine, Harper's,--built to 200,000 circulation--- which was
much more reprints of English writers whereas Putnam's published many
now-canonical American writers, such as Melville but, according to the
Cambridge Whatever of American Literature
started with a 20,000 and declined from there. (Some sources say circa was
higher)

https://books.google.com/books?id=w5CqVEfagbQC&pg=PA78&dq=circulation+of+Putnam's+magazine+in+1850s?&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiMg-bavLLRAhUI4yYKHRYfBPIQ6AEINzAF#v=onepage&q=circulation%20of%20Putnam's%20magazine%20in%201850s%3F&f=false

more research is needed but my general knowledge leads me to think that
this story was effectively OP until the Melville revival.


On Sun, Jan 8, 2017 at 6:35 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, he finds some writers and stories are Art before the time in
> question. He is speaking of a critical aggregate and wider variety than
> Melville, Hawthorne and Poe (more minor, he thinks) ....
>
> He sez, scoring the basic
> disinterest of Americans, "readers who haven't (even) read Melville (yet)"
> about the present.....I am sure you know how
> Into Oblivion Melville went before his rediscovery in the 1920s?
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 8, 2017 at 6:21 AM, bulb <bulb at vheissu.net> wrote:
>
>> Bartleby was published in 1853.
>>
>>
>>
>> Michel.
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] *On
>> Behalf Of *Mark Kohut
>> *Sent:* zondag 8 januari 2017 12:10
>> *To:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> *Subject:* NP much but a little. Chicago World's Fair
>>
>>
>>
>> Some might find this not uninteresting.
>>
>>
>>
>> Guy named Edward O'Brien,
>>
>> who seemed to be the founder, or at least first editor for the annual
>> American
>>
>> Best Short Stories of the Year for a long while, made his bones with
>>
>> a book on the American short story to that publication time, which was
>> 1931,
>>
>> it seems.
>>
>>
>>
>> in this book's preface, one learns that he was friends with Robert Graves
>> (!)
>>
>> and his vision of the story is, when it is art, it is the presentation of
>> a new 'form of life'
>>
>> on the page. It offers a formed richness of emotions outside of
>> standardized ways of
>>
>> feeling. Almost Lawrentian, I'd say.
>>
>>
>>
>> It is THE American art form literarily, he argues.
>>
>> America's  novelists ain't like them great English writers, with an
>> exception or two, such as Moby Dick which ain't like them English writers
>> as well.
>>
>>
>>
>> Anyway, he argues that it is around the time of the Chicago World's Fair
>> that
>>
>> the short story in the US changed and deepened in the aggregate enough to
>>
>> produce a few most important Artists of the genre, of the real and new
>> forms of life.
>>
>> From the Fair thru the next 20 years
>>
>> of all the new immigrants which produced the seedbed for those richness of
>>
>> emotions to overcome the standard US 'frontier' sensibility (in general).
>>
>>
>>
>> I send this re Pynchon as another example of his artistic finding of
>> seminal events
>>
>> to frame his novels around.
>>
>> When you go for the King (of Achievements), you better not miss--
>>
>> and he doesn't.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20170108/e12dfd90/attachment.html>