Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
I am pleased to see that I am not alone in my beliefs. Thanks Less, you put it so clearly.
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And so clearly wrong. Nothing more than falling foul of "The Intentional Fallacy".
"An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king" is no doubt a political and social observation. However, much of Shelley's other work cannot without tortuous interpretation be placed into this category. Much satire can be social commentary, Swift's "Modest Proposal" for example. But we have no idea what Swift believed he was writing when he penned it. Probably not literature ... oops, that should be "Literature", a subject that doesn't arrive on the scene until the late nineteenth century. Most texts that are allowed into the canon by the academics present a diversity that defies being placed into neat categories. What the hell, for example, is Browne's "Urn Burial"? The sermons of Andrewes are considered "Literature", and they were plundered by T. S. Eliot, but are they comments on contemporary life? I don't be thinking so. Gibbon is no longer history; it is "Literature". I could go on for ever, and I have been known to
; however, there is nothing in any text that is independent of the reader and the ideology he brings to the act of reading.