Reading: 18th C and Narrative Voice

[sartorias]

I realized from an early age that rereading meant the book would change. One knew what would happen, so the surprise was gone, but if one could anticipate favorite scenes, savoring set in

Comments

[sartorias]

Yes! As soon as I get to retire, I want to do some volunteer work for them. I've DLed a couple of things that otherwise would have cost hundreds due to their rarity.

[lnhammer]

Cibber doesn't come off well in the Dunciad, either.

I never did make it through either Shamela, and Pamela only abridged. Ditto Clarissa for that matter, but I liked it well enough I have the complete waiting for a spare couple weeks. Tom Jones is a fave, though - that's a good-un.

---L.

[sartorias]

I love Tom Jones--and Humphrey Clinker as well, to bring in Smollett.

[lnhammer]

Clinker was good, too. I need to read more Smollett. And all the rest of those guys. I'm much better grounded in Austen's contemporaries and immediate predecessors than earlier.

---L.

[baldanders]

Poor Colley Cibber seems to have had the misfortune of being an able entertainer more celebrated than the geniuses of his day, and since one of those geniuses was Alexander Pope and another was Henry Fielding, literary history has found their views persuasive and given Cibber rather a hard drubbing, maybe harder than he deserves.

But I am generally fond of the able entertainers.

At any rate, his autobiography, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, is a fun read.

[sartorias]

You're right. I read it years ago when I did a grad school paper on the evolution of theatre, and it was a lot of fun!

But he did make the error actors often make of quarreling with his writers, and forgetting that those writers don't just put words into the mouths of actors....

[ursule]

I read Pamela and Fanny Hill in swift succession, which improved both; but what surprised me more was that after I prevented my roommate for that summer (who had moved from Vietnam to the US all of two years before) from reading the Anita Blake books I had borrowed from somebody or other on the grounds that they were morally flawed and would make no sense without serious cultural context, she picked up Pamela, read all of it, and declared that it was stunningly romantic.

[merriehaskell]

But this time I was able to perceive, however dimly, how exhilarating that novel must have been for contemporary readers, with its new style, new approach to structure and to character.

I had a moment like this with Shakespeare once... it's like a little nugget of time travel, delivered directly to your head. And sort of amazing.