Word: meredithian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hill. Almost stone-deaf, looking, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, like a ruined bust of Euripides, Meredith held court. When no one else was around, he talked to his dogs. In art, as in life, he was a nonstop talker, and it is the rhetorical, aphoristic Meredithian grand manner that finally puts off today's readers. Reading Meredith in quantity, Pritchett concedes, is like "a continuous diet of lobster and champagne," leading him to speculate whether writers with poor stomachs compensate with rich prose. (Meredith, a would-be gourmet, was afflicted by dyspepsia and had to survive...
Lionel Stevenson, biographer of Thackeray and professor of English at the University of Southern California, is just such a historian and a Meredithian to boot. His Ordeal of George Meredith is the first grand-scale resurrection of Victorian literature's most neglected writer. Other writers (including Henry James and Oscar Wilde) have briefly and brilliantly discussed Meredith's peculiar genius, but none has placed him in the great chain so accurately as Stevenson or studied his life and letters with such devoted care...
...Greatest Love Story Ever Written" does not live up to its title. "'Just like you,' reproached Jimmy," "'What's the matter?' I sympathizes," "'My versatility be hanged!' exploded Jimmy," and other Meredithian touches, fail to give a threadbare subject absorbing interest...
| 1 |