Word: victorian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kate Millett says, "I have a lot of trouble getting jobs." Just how much call is there for anyone who is a specialist in-Victorian English literature...
...distinction is difficult to prove. For one thing, pornography has been a private enthusiasm, so that epochs of conservative outward rectitude, such as Victorian England, have produced lush undergrowths of erotica. And anyone who has ever attended a smoker with conservatives in, say, Prairie Village, Kansas, knows that the gusto for smut is nonpartisan. When he heard of the report, California Congressman John Rousselot, a conservative Republican, grumbled: "How did they determine it? I know they didn't interview...
Aggressive Prudery. Meredith was divided, above all, on the subject of sex. Like every Victorian author, he suffered, in Pritchett's words, "from the aggressive prudery of his readers." Much as he might have liked to strip down to bare revelations, Meredith, a tailor's son to the end, settled for a costume change, etherealizing passion and abstracting love into a distant, chaste project. Still, it can be argued that no novelist of the 19th century had more to tell about the destructive and self-destructive impulses that coexist with love...
...took Meredith the better part of his life to catch on. Nevertheless, by the time of his death-May 18, 1909-he had come to a glorious Victorian sunset as the Sage of Box 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...
...reason." Nonetheless, it was Meredith's "splendid vanity," concludes Pritchett, that gave him the strength to put his contradictions on the line and struggle to resolve them. That, for Meredith, was what it meant to write a novel. The curse of self-consciousness may have made him hopelessly Victorian in manner. But that self-consciousness, deepened at best into self-awareness, also made Meredith our secret contemporary...