Word: realism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...such bald outline can give even the superficial taste of this big (912-page) book. It contains hundreds of characters, scenes that range from harsh realism through satire and humor to passages of Joycean impressionism, Whitmanesque poetry. In form it is variously a narrative, an epic, a diatribe, a chronicle, a psalm, but in essence it is a U. S. voice. Author Wolfe's whole theme: "Why is it we have crossed the stormy seas so many times alone, lain in a thousand alien rooms at night hearing the sounds of time, dark time, and thought until heart, brain...
...rich and strange book called The Salzburg Tales, by an unknown Australian author named Christina Stead. With her second, published last week, she made the oversight more remarkable. A needlewoman of extraordinary skill, she has made a lavishly embroidered silk purse out of the sow's ear of realism...
Time was when Robert Nathan toyed gently and amiably with his congenital melancholia. Always a writer who preferred fantasy to strict realism, he once put his deepest convictions into the mouths of dancing dogs, unwed mice and such philosophical creatures as Isaiah, the stoic horse of The Woodcutter's House. When he was not bringing wisdom out of the mouths of baby tumblebugs and suckling pigs, he was engaged in mild satires on religion (The Bishop's Wife, There Is Another Heaven). But Depression, if it did not quite succeed in bringing him down to solid earth...
...tribute to Gainsborough, whom he salutes as an artist unique in the XVIIIth century, who "saw and felt plastically." Even Macaulay's schoolboy must have been struck by the curious inability of the XVIIITH century to draw a Gothic tower that did not look "faked," perhaps Gainsborough's realism came from his scepticism about the validity of the laws of the school. "When Sir Joshua declared that the main mass of a picture could not be blue" he painted the "Blue Boy," perhaps his best-known work. Blake, of course, is the ideal artistic anarchist, "an almost perfect example...
...always been a nice problem in the past to determine where realism leaves off and burlesque begins in Erskine Caldwell's novels (Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre). But this new Caldwell story will not give many readers trouble, for it reads throughout like a complete travesty of the author's previous method. Journeyman is the story of an itinerant preacher. Semon Dye, the "potentest" man that ever drove a ramshackle remnant of a Model T Ford down a Georgia turnpike. Semon is a crap-shooting, corn-guzzling, philandering highbinder with a gimlet eye and a ready...