Word: swiftian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When the Ekwilist State triumphs, murdering innocence, Nabokov's style is still playful, but it takes on a Swiftian intensity. Krug goes mad. And it is clear that the professor's doom (which is Europe's) came about not merely because he was honorable, but because he was vain, obtuse to evil, and absorbed in his own past...
...Itching Parrot's further pages include a cruelly realistic marriage, a gruesome, slapstick try at corpse robbing, harsh satire on civil and priestly extortion, some Swiftian dialogues with a Chinaman on law, religion, medicine, the rich. At length he meets repentance head-on in the dead person of an old pal: "I saw hanging to a tree the impaled corpse of an executed man in his white gown and tall cap adorned with a red cross, his hands bound." Towards the virtuous end of his life Poll finds a new pal-"One Lizárdi . . . a sorry writer...
...Harvard's Harry Levin was one of the few that gave James Joyce the sense that his book had a reader. Mr. Levin's volume on Joyce is designed to be read along with Joyce's works. On Joyce's powers of characterization, on his Swiftian moral grandeur, and on that almost Shakespearean humaneness which alone could delight the plainest of readers, he is obtuse as only a hyperintellectual can be. But on those intricate obscurities which put off most plain readers, and on Joyce as a technician and theorist, he has written the best guidebook...
...vernacular, as un-Wolfeishly plain as weathered bone. Also included: a steely-clean character sketch of a rich old New Yorker waking up; an almost religious essay on loneliness; a hard spanking of a literary critic who might be William Lyon Phelps or Henry Seidel Canby; a Swiftian attack on Irishmen; a few poignant pages on Cousin Arnold in which is resurrected the snorting ghost of that great comic character Bascom Hawke...