Henry James comes home - Who would have carried Plummeridge’s portmanteau?
The next Henry James novel I am going to read is What Maisie Knew (1897), spurred by Lakeside Musing and others, but since the last one I read was The Portrait of a Lady (1882), and I want to know what...
View Articletoo serious for a joke and too comical for anything else - more Henry James...
I said James, post-Portrait of a Lady was bringing his Europeanized Americans back to America, but I only quoted an Englishman, a stuffy Member of Parliament. James was bringing some Europeans over,...
View Articlea deficiency of shading - "The Siege of London" and "Lady Barberina"
The most frequently reprinted, and best, of the James tales I read recently were “The Siege of London” (1883) and “Lady Barberina” (1884), both 90-pagers with many short chapters – little mini-novels....
View ArticleE. A. Robinson's abhorred iconoclast, Captain Craig - guest appearance by...
Time throws awayDead thousands of them, but the God that knowsNo death denies not one: the books all count,The songs all count… (p. 5)Some lines from...
View ArticleTake care of the little box - Charles Simic's prose poems and knickknacks and...
I have at hand Charles Simic’s little books about Joseph Cornell, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (1992). Cornell is one of classic American eccentrics like Captain Craig. I think of...
View ArticleNibbling the sacred cheese of life with Stephen Crane
Reading Stephen Crane in – not in bulk – in handfuls, in heaps – has been rewarding. He was an astounding short story writer, with a wide range of subject, tone, and rhetorical flash. He was moving...
View ArticleWonderful epithets - Stephen Crane rattles some words around
I see that The Portable Stephen Crane also divvies up his work by geography, although with less prosaic names. “The World of Maggie” (New York City), “A World of Shipwreck” (the “Open Boat” incident),...
View Articlestern, mournful, and fine - Stephen Crane's fatalism
Stephen Crane’s fatalism is well earned. The arbitrariness of death was with him from an early age, when he likely contracted tuberculosis. Shipwreck and battlefields could only reinforce the idea....
View ArticleOnly a little ink more or less - Crane's War Is Kind
War Is Kind (1899) is Stephen Crane’s second and last book of poetry, another tiny little Arts & Crafts book with poems – or “lines” or “pills” as Crane called them – much like those in The Black...
View ArticleHe felt like a good man - William Dean Howell's A Modern Instance
A Modern Instance (1882), William Dean Howells. This is the first Howells novel I have read. Once upon a time, it was a famous book, much read. Even now, it is one of two Howells novel still in...
View ArticleThe old people thought it all beautiful - some William Dean Howells prose
My case against A Modern Instance has two main parts. First:They had got down to Charles street, and Halleck took out his watch at the corner lamp.“It isn’t at all late yet; only half-past eight. The...
View ArticleLord Byron is a vampire who gives Bibles to poor children
Prof. Burstein has been teaching a class in the “Nineteenth-Century Gothic” this semester and I have been reading around in the syllabus, just the works I had not read, so no Frankenstein or Jane Eyre...
View Articleeverything marvellous, glorious, terrible, joyful, harrowing - E. T. A....
Polidori’s Byronic vampire gave me a taste to read something similar but, how to say this, better, so I turned to a couple of E. T. A. Hoffmann stories, “The Sandman” and “The Artushof,” both published...
View Articlea higher, unearthly realm of things - "The Artushof," sweet, gentle...
“The Artushof” is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s sweet inversion of “The Sandman,” an uncanny tale about the development of an artist that looks like it could take a turn towards the horror of “The Sandman” but...
View ArticleThe actual was the absolute, the present alone was vivid - opening What...
What a shock to move from The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and its environs to What Maisie Knew (1897). The sentences lengthen, the prose thickens, the ungrounded metaphors spread. “Maisie could...
View ArticleWhat Maisie Knew in layers and riddles - deficient in something that would...
After the opening rush of the opening chapters of What Maisie Knew, the novel settles into something more conventional yet also unusual. We have the little girl’s divorced parents, for whom Maisie is...
View Article“It MUST do us good – it's all so hideous” - What Maisie Knew as a novel of...
Is What Maisie Knew a kind of Bildungsroman? Or is it the reverse, a parody, of the novel of development? How much development - meaning of the moral sensibility – should I expect of a nine...
View ArticleHenry James uses metaphors
This will be something of a What Maisie Knew note dump. I have said what I have to say and now just have questions. The big one is how James uses metaphors. I don’t understand it yet. I ended my...
View Articlethe cedar-chest of indifference, the grace of artificiality - some early...
Early Edith Wharton short stories, those are things I have read recently. I went so far as to read an entire book of them, in non-book form, the 1899 The Greater Inclination. It is Wharton’s first...
View Articlethe lines have the value of color - a Wharton short story rummage
I had thought that the only Edith Wharton I had read until now was Citizen Kane, but no, I had read but forgotten the story that leads off The Greater Inclination, Wharton’s first book. The story is...
View ArticleTolstoy's Confession - so what?
While Leo Tolstoy was writing the greatest novel of all time, Anna Karenina (1877) he was passing through a period of personal religious crisis that led him to renounce the artistic impulse that led to...
View ArticleI did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible - Tolstoy is some of one, some...
“The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886) is accurately titled and is a work of great somberness, mostly. Yet it begins satirically, even farcically. The judge Ivan Ilych has just died. His colleagues wonder...
View ArticleIt's moving! It's alive! - Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness combats evil and...
With “The Kreutzer Sonata,” I was visiting an old enemy. Completely new to me was Leo Tolstoy’s most famous play, to the extent that they have any fame at all, The Power of Darkness, published in...
View ArticleTrumbull Stickney's hopeless exercise of beauty
Sir, say no more.Within me ‘t is as ifThe green and climbing eyesight of a catCrawled near my mind’s poor birds.This poem or fragment ends the 1905 Poems of Trumbull Stickney, the poet who resembles a...
View ArticleNo more than twilight on a ruin - Edwin Arlington Robinson's The Town down...
I believe I will continue to spend the week rummaging through old books of poems. No pretensions to any insight. Look at this; look at that.Today, The Town down the River (1910) by Edwin Arlington...
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