I like literary archetypes. To me, they’re the puzzle pieces a person can assemble to understand the canon of Western Literature. Anti-heroes, tricksters, mentors and shadows are all wonderful but my favorite is the orphan-hero. His search is for home, his judgments are his own and like all archetypes he/she morphs to reflect the values of whatever era he’s created in.** If yesterday...
Full disclosure: I love the novel Oliver Twist but I can’t say I love the title character. He cries far to easily for my taste and he’s altogether too sweet for words. Dickens wanted to show Oliver’s basic gentle nature couldn’t be corrupted by the environment he lived in but basically his protagonist is a Casper Milquetoast. When people are kind to him, he laps it up and soaks them ...
Veteran’s Day is coming up and I can’t help thinking about a poem called “Ode of Remembrance” by Laurence Binyon. It reads (in part) They went with songs to the battle, they were young.Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,They fell with their faces to the foe. They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:Age shall not weary them, ...
Readers love a seldom-read story or an under-praised author. To appreciate a less-known work or author is the a mark of a book connoisseur and readers delight in being seen as connoisseurs. Without knowing it, my sister and I trained to be gourmet readers when we grew reading the work of an under-appreciated writer. You may or may not have heard of Shirley Jackson but do you know about her...
So intones Judith Starkadder, at the beginning of Stella Gibbon’s comic masterpiece Cold Comfort Farm. To Judith Starkadder this statement is a curse and a warning but it’s more of an opening salvo in the war of English novel types. On one side are the moor, mud and fen school of Novels where the clouds are always lowering, the males are always glowering and life is eternally soiled. Opposing this school o...