Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
I can't stand Dickens, not fond of Jane Austen, Bronte sisters leave me cold...in fact all of the traditional writers I find hard to read....I think I must be a philistine.
|
No ... not a philistine ... just born and raised in a different time. In terms of the novel .... it doesn't really come on the scene until 1740, with "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded", which presented major problems for the reader, ones which were brilliantly ridiculed in "Shamela" (1741), probably written by Fielding, although he never admitted authorship. Like modern prose fiction, works from earlier periods follow certain "parochial rules", satisfy various expectations. Some, of course, like some works of pictoral art, or some musical works achieve a sort of timelessness, their popularity sometimes underlined by their survival. If we look at Chaucer, for example, his works survive because he somehow transcends the limitations of his age. One would think that the only guy writing in the late Middle Ages was Chaucer ... well, maybe Langland, and whoever it was who wrote "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" ... but this, of course, isn't true. I think it's time to stop this ramble before I get into a discussion of Cervantes and Aphra Behn
