Word: huxley
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...century ago, when the historical optimists still believed in eternal progress, the earthly future looked like bright heaven. Today, for a whole school of literary pessimists, it looks like unshaded hell. The harbingers of doom, headed by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four), have now been joined by Frenchman Jean Malaquais. His world of the future is as grim a nightmare as theirs. But the hero of Malaquais' The Joker is not one to surrender to a nightmare. What makes him different from most of his fictional counterparts is his unbreakable will to live...
This book belongs to the cozy tradition of bedside belles-lettres. The selections, picked well off the main highroad of English literature, range from stormy thrillers to sunny farce, from the thunder of Samuel Johnson's prose to the lightning of Aldous Huxley's. They include little-known works by little-read writers as well as little read works by well-known writers: Maria Edgeworth, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, George Meredith, Thomas Love Peacock, William Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf. Few readers will like all of these stories, but almost everybody will be entertained...
...somewhat wiser from the coffin in which they have nailed him. In Meredith's The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper, a complex English lady joins battle with a simple British general, reduces his defenses, and finally takes him into her camp as a lifetime ally. In Huxley's The Farcical History of Richard Greenow, a brilliant young man is possessed of a sister personality. When he isn't functioning as himself, Richard Greenow, a fighting pacifist, he is operating as Pearl Bellairs, a violently patriotic war propagandist-all of which permits Author Huxley...
...creed. It is also the key book in Biographer Stevenson's joining of the chain of intellectual comedy which runs approximately from Sterne's Tristram Shandy, through Peacock's novels, down via The Egoist to much of Oscar Wilde, Shaw and even the early Aldous Huxley. And yet, Meredith remains as freakishly separate from these other links in the literary chain as does Thorstein Veblen in the chain of social philosophers-and for much the same reasons. He tried to depict life accurately, but, in Wilde's words: "His style would be quite sufficient of itself...
...Huxley, Arnold Toynbee, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook...