Word: victorian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are novelists that almost nobody reads and almost everybody feels guilty about. Then there are novelists that nobody reads-and what's more, nobody feels he has to. On this non-must list, the Victorian George Meredith ranks high-unfairly high, argues V.S. Pritchett, an expert craftsman of satirical short stories and, at 69, still Britain's best practicing critic...
...Meredith a man who had something to Say to Our Times -although he did not quite know how to say it. In Pritchett's critique, Meredith emerges as a writer trapped in a literary no man's land: he kept raising modern questions but ended up with Victorian answers...
Meredith was one of the first novelists to face up to "modern love"-he even wrote a sonnet sequence with that title. He was also something of an early feminist; indeed, it was part of his literary credo that comedy could not exist without equality of the sexes. Among Victorian writers, he was conspicuous for creating women characters who could think -"the lady with brains," as he described his heroine in The Egoist. Meredith married one himself-the daughter of another comic novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. She collaborated with him on a study of the art of cookery, bore...
Originality must be purchased, artistically speaking. For Bergman, the cost of replacing the traditional Victorian furnishings with a more symbolic setting is a tendency toward abstractness. For Miss Smith, the cost of replacing the outwardly thwarted new woman of Hedda's day with a more inwardly racked characterization is a slight taint of the clinical case history. But both transactions are bargains. In place of Ibsen's now somewhat dated "modernity," Bergman's and Miss Smith's theatricality seems timelessly contemporary...
Salvation; damnation. Libertinism; slavery. Sexuality; death. To D.H. Lawrence, life was a series of primal contests, a mirror image of the Victorian ideal. Reason lay on one side, passion beckoned on the other, and woe betide the maiden who chose the wrong path. Lawrence, of course, was the advocate of passion. "The tragedy," he warned, "is when you've got sex in your head, instead of down where it belongs...