Word: fictioneering
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Admired Unread. As a sampler of vintage literature, Pritchett has excellent taste. These 32 brief essays (many of which have appeared in London's New Statesman and Nation) restore the grandeur of such unvisited landmarks of English fiction as Humphrey Clinker, Middlemarch, Heart of Midlothian, Edwin Drood. They reduce to scale some modern writers-Wells, Bennett, D. H. Lawrence-while adding to the dimensions of several continental Europeans and two Americans: Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane...
...Richardson introduced the "principle of procrastinated rape [which] is said to be the ruling one in all the great best-sellers." Fielding, Pritchett says, is the granddaddy of them all: in his work the reader can not only "pick out the perennial characters of the main part of English fiction, but . . . many of its idiosyncrasies and limits. Sociable man, social problems, middle-class humor, the didactic habit, the club culture, the horseplay, the gregarious rather than the single...
...shown good judgment in not chopping Conrad's longer masterpieces into incomprehensible fragments just to get them inside an anthology. He has also made room for a score of Conrad's wry and courtly letters and Conrad's most important statements on the art of fiction...
...honesty. As Zabel says, "He corrected the failure of his contemporaries to become morally implicated in what they were doing." Zabel's critical introduction to this book is a striking recognition of the fact that in Conrad's case it is hard to separate the art of fiction from the struggle to tell the truth; all Conrad's narratives in their way exemplify his own obedience to Stein's famous injunction in Lord Jim: ". . . To the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep...
Grenadine Etching is a lampoon on the big-bosomed heroines of lending-library historical fiction-seemingly a sure-fire subject. The author, a Scripps-Howard columnist, must have thought so, because he didn't work hard enough...