Word: languidness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...languid young man who conducted the London-to-Oxford University tour was quite unlike any guide the tourists had ever seen before. "You must be very patient," he drawled as the bus pulled out of London. "You see, anything might happen on this tour." As the day wore on,-the sightseers saw just what 20-year-old Tom Stacey meant. The trip they took last week-the first ever run by Oxford undergraduates-was something to remember...
...rebellious young intellectuals, it was the resolute opposite of Victorianism. Against Mrs. Grundy's boned corset it set the languid flow of an Aubrey Beardsley tunic. It opposed ice-water morality with the dreggy wine of French "realism." It countered convention with Oscar Wildeish witticisms ("Where is the pleasure of having parents if you may not disobey them"). For common sense it substituted shamelessly overgrown verbiage (" 'Tears, little one,' I said. 'See how they swim like whitebait in the fish-pools of your eyes...
...straight drawing-room comedy, The Day After Tomorrow is anemic but agreeable. In its British way it manages to seem rather distinguished even when it is out at elbows. It has a nice languid urbanity, a pleasant suggestion of wit; and Melville Cooper is the suavest of performers playing the worldliest of peers. What does serious harm to the play is not its tenuous gaiety but its interminable romance. This not only makes for labored playwriting, but is never really in the true Lonsdale manner. Never was such real insouciance elbowed by such phony scruples; and never, for that matter...
Playwright Tennessee Williams' first novel shows no trace of the warmth and grotesque humor that made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire into first-class stage hits. It is written in the gutless, languid, pseudo-Jamesian manner which has become the trademark of such young novelists as Truman Capote and Frederick Buechner. In fact, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone would seem to make Tennessee Williams a member in good, if junior, standing of the new school of decadence...
Bestsellers have never been Conrad Aiken's forte. He reached the peak of his reputation during the '20s, when he wrote long and languid narratives about sexual decadence, blending the theories of Sigmund Freud with the tone of Edgar Allan Poe. In 1930, his poetry won him a Pulitzer Prize. Since then, Aiken has increasingly found himself in the painful position of the good minor writer who has ceased to be a novelty, his name well known but his work little read. Never one to cater to literary fashion, Aiken has continued to write as he sees...