Ephemera Critica or plain truths about current literature

The Device Laid Bare: On Some Limitations in Current Art Criticism

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The Book of One Thousand and One Nights was first published in Europe from to in French, and then translated immediately into English and German, and was seen as a contribution to Huet's history of romances. The English, Select Collection of Novels in six volumes —22 , is a milestone in this development of the novel's prestige. It included Huet's Treatise , along with the European tradition of the modern novel of the day: Aphra Behn 's novels had appeared in the s but became classics when reprinted in collections.

New authors entering the market were now ready to use their personal names rather than pseudonyms, including Eliza Haywood , who in following in the footsteps of Aphra Behn used her name with unprecedented pride. The very word romanticism is connected to the idea of romance, and the romance genre experienced a revival, at the end of the 18th century, with gothic fiction , that began in with English author Horace Walpole 's The Castle of Otranto , subtitled in its second edition "A Gothic Story".

The new romances challenged the idea that the novel involved a realistic depictions of life, and destabilized the difference the critics had been trying to establish, between serious classical art and popular fiction. Gothic romances exploited the grotesque , [62] and some critics thought that their subject matter deserved less credit than the worst medieval tales of Arthurian knighthood. The authors of this new type of fiction were accused of exploiting all available topics to thrill, arouse, or horrify their audience. These new romantic novelists, however, claimed that they were exploring the entire realm of fictionality.

And psychological interpreters, in the early 19th century, read these works as encounters with the deeper hidden truth of the human imagination: Under such readings, novels were described as exploring deeper human motives, and it was suggested that such artistic freedom would reveal what had not previously been openly visible. Hoffmann , Die Elixiere des Teufels , would later attract 20th-century psychoanalysts and supply the images for 20th- and 21st-century horror films, love romances , fantasy novels, role-playing computer games, and the surrealists.

The historical romance was also important at this time. But, while earlier writers of these romances paid little attention to historical reality, Walter Scott 's historical novel Waverley broke with this tradition, and he invented "the true historical novel". His work remained historical fiction, yet it questioned existing historical perceptions. The use of historical research was an important tool: Scott, the novelist, resorted to documentary sources as any historian would have done, but as a romantic he gave his subject a deeper imaginative and emotional significance.

In the 19th century the relationship between authors, publishers, and readers, changed. Authors originally had only received payment for their manuscript, however, changes in copyright laws , which began in 18th and continued into 19th century [67] promised royalties on all future editions. Another change in the 19th century was that novelists began to read their works in theaters, halls, and bookshops.

New institutions like the circulating library created a new market with a mass reading public. Another difference was that novels began to deal with more difficult subjects, including current political and social issues, that were being discussed in newspapers and magazines. The idea of social responsibility became a key subject, whether of the citizen, or of the artist, with the theoretical debate concentrating on questions around the moral soundness of the modern novel.

Major British writers such as Charles Dickens [72] and Thomas Hardy [73] were influenced by the romance genre tradition of the novel, which had been revitalized during the Romantic period. Many 19th-century authors dealt with significant social matters. In the United States slavery and racism became topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe 's Uncle Tom's Cabin , which dramatizes topics that had previously been discussed mainly in the abstract.

Charles Dickens ' novels led his readers into contemporary workhouses , and provided first-hand accounts of child labor. Similarly the treatment of crime is very different in Fyodor Dostoyevsky 's Crime and Punishment , where the point of view is that of a criminal. Women authors had dominated fiction from the s into the early 18th century, but few before George Eliot so openly questioned the role, education, and status of women in society, as she did.

As the novel became a platform of modern debate, national literatures were developed that link the present with the past in the form of the historical novel. Alessandro Manzoni 's I Promessi Sposi did this for Italy, while novelists in Russia and the surrounding Slavonic countries, as well as Scandinavia , did likewise.

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Along with this new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for fiction. This had been done earlier in works like Samuel Madden 's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century and Mary Shelley 's The Last Man , a work whose plot culminated in the catastrophic last days of a mankind extinguished by the plague. Edward Bellamy 's Looking Backward and H. Wells 's The Time Machine were concerned with technological and biological developments. Industrialization , Darwin 's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of class divisions shaped these works and turned historical processes into a subject of wide debate.

James Joyce 's Ulysses had a major influence on modern novelists, in the way that it replaced the 18th- and 19th-century narrator with a text that attempted to record inner thoughts, or a " stream of consciousness ". This term was first used by William James in and, along with the related term interior monologue , is used by modernists like Dorothy Richardson , Marcel Proust , Virginia Woolf , and William Faulkner.

2. New Criteria

On the other hand, Robert Coover is an example of those authors who, in the s, fragmented their stories and challenged time and sequentiality as fundamental structural concepts. The 20th century novels deals with a wide range of subject matter. The Jazz Age is explored by American F. The rise of totalitarian states is the subject of British writer George Orwell.

Novelist have also been interested in the subject of racial and gender identity in recent decades. Louis has described Chuck Palahniuk 's Fight Club as "a closeted feminist critique". Furthermore, the major political and military confrontations of the 20th and 21st centuries have also influenced novelists. The subsequent Cold War influenced popular spy novels. Another major 20th-century social events, the so-called sexual revolution is reflected in the modern novel.

Lawrence 's Lady Chatterley's Lover had to be published in Italy in ; British censorship lifted its ban as late as In the second half of the 20th century, Postmodern authors subverted serious debate with playfulness, claiming that art could never be original, that it always plays with existing materials. A postmodernist re-reads popular literature as an essential cultural production.

Thriller , Westerns and Speculative fiction. While the reader of so-called serious literature will follow public discussions of novels, popular fiction production employs more direct and short-term marketing strategies by openly declarating of the work's genre. Popular novels are based entirely on the expectations for the particular genre, and this includes the creation of a series of novels with an identifiable brand name. Popular literature holds a larger market share.

Genre literature might be seen as the successor of the early modern chapbook. Both fields share a focus on readers who are in search of accessible reading satisfaction. The modern adventure novel goes back to Daniel Defoe 's Robinson Crusoe and its immediate successors. Modern pornography has no precedent in the chapbook market but originates in libertine and hedonistic belles lettres, of works like John Cleland 's Fanny Hill and similar eighteenth century novels.

Ian Fleming 's James Bond is a descendant of the anonymous yet extremely sophisticated and stylish narrator who mixed his love affairs with his political missions in La Guerre d'Espagne Marion Zimmer Bradley 's The Mists of Avalon is influenced by Tolkien , as well as Arthurian literature , including its 19th-century successors.

Modern horror fiction also has no precedent on the market of chapbooks but goes back to the elitist market of earlyth-century Romantic literature. Modern popular science fiction has an even shorter history, from the s. The authors of popular fiction tend to advertise that they have exploited a controversial topic and this is a major difference between them and so-called elitist literature.

Dan Brown , for example, discusses, on his website, the question whether his Da Vinci Code is an anti-Christian novel. However, the boundaries between popular and serious literature have blurred in recent years, with postmodernism and poststructuralism , as well as by adaptation of popular literary classics by the film and television industries. Crime became a major subject of 20th and 21st century genre novelists and crime fiction reflects the realities of modern industrialized societies.

Crime is both a personal and public subject: Patricia Highsmith 's thrillers became a medium of new psychological explorations. Paul Auster 's New York Trilogy — is an example of experimental postmodernist literature based on this genre. Fantasy is another major area of commercial fiction, and a major example is J. Tolkien in fact revived the tradition of European epic literature in the tradition of Beowulf , the North Germanic Edda and the Arthurian Cycles.

Science fiction , is another important type of genre fiction and it has developed in a variety of ways, ranging from the early, technological adventure Jules Verne had made fashionable in the s, to Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World about Western consumerism and technology. Clarke produced modern classics which focus on the interaction between humans and machines. The surreal novels of Philip K Dick such as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch explore the nature of reality, reflecting the widespread recreational experimentation with drugs and cold-war paranoia of the 60's and 70's.

Writers such as Ursula le Guin and Margaret Atwood explore feminist and broader social issues in their works. William Gibson , author of the cult classic Neuromancer , is one of a new wave of authors who explore post-apocalyptic fantasies and virtual reality. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. April Learn how and when to remove this template message.

For other uses, see Novel disambiguation. Not to be confused with Novell. This section needs additional citations for verification. March Learn how and when to remove this template message. Ancient Greek novel and Byzantine novel. Heroic romances and 17th-century French literature.

French literature of the 19th century and Victorian literature. Modernism , Postmodernism , Antinovel , and Nouveau roman. February Learn how and when to remove this template message. British regional literature Chain novel Children's literature Gay literature Nautical fiction Proletarian novel Psychological novel Sociology of literature Social novel War novel Web fiction. Rutgers University Press, , rept. Retrieved 25 April Oxford University Press, , p. Romance should not be confused with Harlequin Romance.

The Great Writers [] London: A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature [first German edition ], transl. The MIT Press, Daphnis and Chloe; Xenophon of Ephesus: Curzon Press, , p. An Anthology of Sources , p. Schmeling, and Tim Whitmarsh hrsg.

Oxford University Press, Lewis , The Discarded Image , p. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 19 April The Great Reclothing of Rural England. Proceedings of the Scottish Society of Antiquarians Zur Literaturgeschichte des einfachen Lesers. Die abentheuerliche Welt in einer Pickelheerings-Kappe , vol. Poetik, Funktion und Rezeption einer niederen Gattung im Frankreich des Narrative Forms, — University of Delaware Press, Sentimens sur les lettres et sur l'histoire, avec des scruples sur le stile Paris: The Essence of Style: Pearl Buck and the Chinese Novel , p.

Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding London, Penguin Books, , p. Morphew, , would thus include the story of "Lucian's Ass", vol. Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, — New York: Zone, , Inger Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant: Vantilt, , and Lisa Z. Pornography and Social Change in England, — January: Scholarly Book Services Inc, Caldecott, , pp. Gale Research Co, ff. Morphew, ; The Works of Lucian, , 2 vols. See The Adventures of Theagenes and Chariclia [ Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature , 2nd ed.

Davies Group, Publishers, Prentice Hall, , p. Marion Wynne Davis, p. The Invention of Copyright 3rd ed. James Engell, The committed word: Eigner, George John Worth ed. The North American Review , Vol.

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Studies in English Literature , —, Vol. Preston , p. Harmon and Holman , p. Hayden White , Metahistory: Johns Hopkins University , The Stream-of-consciousness technique in the modern novel Port Washington, N. On the extra-European usage of the technique see also: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist". The International Journal of Existential Literature.

Ephemera critica; or, Plain truths about current literature

Check date values in: Routledge, ; Linda Hutcheon , Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox London: Routledge, and Patricia Waugh, Metafiction. Overview Archived at the Wayback Machine. The subpages offer further statistics for the years since Richetti Popular Fiction before Richardson. Narrative Patterns — Oxford: Archived January 16, , at the Wayback Machine. Alternate history Backstory Dystopia Fictional location city country universe Utopia. Other Shakespearean protagonists have provoked complex responses but none with such diverging interpretations as Henry V.

Arguably the most popular of all the English histories, the play dramatizes the events leading to Agincourt where the incomparable Henry, believing he has a divine right to the kingship of France , leads his men to an unlikely but enthralling victory against the haughty French. Commenting on the ideological ambivalence of the play, James.

Henry V is an unusual play in the sense that it is centred on one major personality. Therefore, the play often has to rely on the dramatic effect of its minor and ephemeral characters. These characters are extraordinarily compelling and their importance cannot be exaggerated; they provide critical perspective of the King, and his interactions with them are designed to undercut and comprise the heroic perception of his character. The first of the suggested locations can be found in the first act of the play, specifically, the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In order to portray Henry V as a hero-saint and exemplar of Christian piety, it is imperative that the justification of war be void of nefarious motivations. We are introduced to the scheming between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely, their thoughts preoccupied with a parliamentary bill that aims to seize all Church lands.

An unacceptable reality, their solution is to essentially bribe the King. In return for the protection of the Church against seized revenue, the Clergy will provide an apparently pious, pseudo-legal rationale for the invasion of France. The justification of war from the outset is marinated with baleful motivations of a political ploy by scheming churchmen. It is as if the Archbishop of Canterbury has given himself permission to behave absurdly and illogically, proving it difficult to take his long, rather unlettered explanation with a modicum of seriousness rendering the entire scene sardonic if not ridiculous.

However, some critics have rejected the comedic and tedious delineations of the speech, arguing that the scene would have been taken very seriously by an Elizabethan audience. However, John Sutherland in his provocative essay, Henry V, war criminal? Sutherland thus concludes that the speech is intended to be regarded not just as tedious but comically tedious. Rejecting the veracity of the Salic law allows Henry to claim the throne based on the fact that his great-great-grandmother was the daughter of Philip IV of France.

In short, the title of the King of France is illegitimate because it devolved through the female line, therefore the legitimate heir is Henry — by descent through a female line! Therefore, if Henry is not the legitimate King of England — which he can never be due to his usurper father — he can seldom claim to be the legitimate King of France. This point is further elaborated by C.

Hobday in his essay entitled, Image and Irony in Henry V: Yet the point is made so obliquely that only a spectator cognizant of the tangled Plantagenet genealogy is likely to catch it. It is doubtful whether Henry truly requires papal coaching regarding the historical justification of his claim; however, what he does indeed require is the public blessing of the Church.

In this fashion, Henry now has God in his favour and any subsequent death caused by war now lie firmly on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The astuteness of Henry is something to behold, and is indicative of a highly intelligent individual who has the ability to expertly shift responsibility to whomever he may seem fit. The war is merely a distraction from the real issue: In order to quell the memory of usurpation, Henry is simply following the advice of his bedridden father. Unfortunately not all giddy minds can be suppressed through the frenzied excitement of foreign quarrels, as some have long memories and remarkable persistence for minds supposedly so giddy.

Regrettably for the conspirators, Henry has already foreknown the existence of the plot and subsequently exposes and denounces their treachery, leading to the inevitable conclusion of their execution. Hence, Henry cannot possibly address the true motives of the conspirators; to do so would draw negative attention to the validity of his claim to the English crown.

The conspiracy could have been repealed altogether if Shakespeare had been trying to portray Henry as a virtuous hero; a mirror of all Christian Kings. For if the premise of war is illegitimate, then its consequences, whether they be commendable or reprehensible are, as a result, unjust. The effect of minor characters on the portrayal of Henry is explicitly evident in the episode with the three soldiers, Alexander Court, John Bates, and Michael Williams, taking place on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt.

The scene brings to the fore a reoccurring problem in Henry V criticism, chiefly, the discrepancy of the Chorus in relation to the action it is describing. The role of the Chorus in Henry V is an important topic of discussion in most critical readings of the play; historically, the Chorus has come to signify and affirm the irresistible patriotic fever directed towards the King. On a similar trajectory, M.

Reese considers the role of the Chorus as an advocate for a celebratory reading of the play. The traditional view leaves us with a Chorus affirming the heroic and virtuous delineation of Henry, however, critics have noticed incongruities in choric proclamations leading to interpretations which take the Chorus and consequently the whole play anti — heroically.

The function of the Chorus is to direct our eye by shaping the events we are about to see. But is it reliable? The frequent and continuous pleas made by the Chorus for the audience to use its imagination are in fact a covert separation of patriotic imagination from reality. Folger Shakespeare Library, Michael Quinn, London Macmillan, Stavrogin and Prince Hal: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, University of Cambridge Press. Henry V, war criminal? The Conspiracy of Silence in Henry V. Inquiries Journal 8 11 , http:

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