Word: paradox
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Unorthodox Orthodoxy. No man was more unorthodox than Chesterton-in his appearance and view of orthodoxy. Author of some 100 novels, stories, plays, volumes of poems, biographies (studies of William Cobbett, Charles Dickens, Chaucer), he was one of modern Britain's keenest literary minds and a master of paradox. A passionate journalist (for 40 years Chesterton wrote for a dozen papers), he was the creator of one of literature's famed sleuths (Father Brown) and the most prominent Roman Catholic convert of his day. A devotee of beer and wine, he weighed between 300 and 400 Ib. Once...
...Weekly, Chesterton summed up his view of modern man: "There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox, that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection and dissatisfaction with themselves. But they have not got the elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to renew...
Critic Trilling approaches this paradox by way of Novelist Forster's literary "manner." "That manner," says Trilling, "is comic; Forster owes much to Fielding, Dickens, Meredith and James. . . . Stendhal believed that gaiety was one of the marks of the healthy intelligence, and we are mistakenly sure that Stendhal was wrong. We suppose that there is necessarily an intellectual 'depth' in the deep tones of the organ; it is possibly the sign of a deprivation-our suspicion of gaiety in art perhaps signifies an inadequate seriousness in ourselves. A generation charmed by the lugubrious-once...
Uneasy Feeling. This paradox, Trilling implies, is a paradox only when readers do not understand Forster's "peculiar relation" to the "liberal tradition, that loose body of middle-class opinion which includes such ideas as progress, collectivism and humanitarianism." Forster has always worked within this tradition-"all his novels are politically and morally tendentious and always in the liberal direction...
Theme & Variations. Upon this theme, in poetry rich in paradox and reward, in mystery, in symbol, in despair and, ultimately, in hope. Eliot develops his great variations. The sere, cryptic titles of the four quartets are the names of places intimately associated with his experience. Burnt Norton was a Gloucestershire man or near which he lived for a while. East Coker is a Somerset village which was the home of his ancestors. The Dry Salvages (accented like assuages) is a group of rocks off Cape Ann, Mass. Little Gidding was a lyth-Century religious community established by Nicholas Ferrar. Each...