October Books 9) The Great Tradition, by F.R. Leavis

[nwhyte]

Back in my Cambridge undergraduate days, we Natural Scientists had a joke about the guy studying English who did not want to look out of the window in the morning, because then he would have had nothing to do in the afternoon. But as I have got more interested in sf criticism, I have felt that maybe I did miss something by not sampling what was on

Comments

[steve_mollmann]

The first half-sentence affirms that "[t]he great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad", and the rest of the book is an elaboration of the greatness of the latter three...

People aren't really allowed to do this in literary criticism anymore. You can think deconstructionism for that.

Sybil is dead boring, but has some okay bits; Hard Times is Dickens without any of the flair and all of the obviousness; and Adam Bede is one of the greatest and most compelling novels I have ever read.

[communicator]

I do think Lovecraft was influenced by Heart of Darkness, especially by the way Conrad hints at horrors without stating them, to chilling effect.

I think that Facts concerning the late Arthur Jermyn and His Family is particularly influenced by Heart of Darkness. Some of it is set in the Congo.

[bopeepsheep]

Lovecraft read Conrad and was impressed.
http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/528922-lovecraft-joseph-conrad-thomas-hardy-and.html
"H. P. Lovecraft considered Joseph Conrad a fine example of "The Weird Tradition in the British Isles" in his 1927 treatise on horror in literature"
http://tinyurl.com/337l2sp

[drasecretcampus]

Have you read Culture and Anarchy, which is the father of the book, so to speak? Culture is the best that has been thought or said and is sweetness and light, but I don't think there are any concrete examples (but Keats would be in there).

I suspect it ends up as a circular argument - the GT/canon is great because we gatekeepers (children of the light) say so, because we have been trained in the GT/canon and the GT/canon enlightens people into becoming gatekeepers.

There's a really interesting book by Chris Baldick on Leavis and the origins of English Studies (think the Raj to educate Johnny Foreigner/soothe the savage beast and WEA for working class wives so they can soothe the etc), which makes connections between Leavis and left of centre thinking. His notion of popular culture is not that far from the Frankfurt School, although his worry is about what the masses will do to us and Frankfurt's is what is being one to the masses.

[chickenfeet2003]

The Secret Agent is definitely worth a read.