Bestsellers

John Sutherland (professor of literature in London and California) is adept in conveying English Literature and its relevance to the general public (not unlike his contemporary John Carey). This book is typical of his approach. It's a guide to the world of best-selling writers - writers of fiction on the whole. And it's focused on the UK and the USA. He writes in a slick, non-patronising manner - as if talking to a peer group in the senior common room. He sees the USA as the hotbed of the bestseller - unfettered by copyright restrictions for much of the nineteenth century. And he's very well informed on the subject of book publication and the commercial side of 'literature'. What he looks at in particular is the question of why certain books become more popular than others... Read more >>

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Pulp Fiction

I found this example of popular literature somewhere in my Net wanderings the other day - and was astonished to discover that the item in question commands a price tag of forty-two dollars at Amazon.com. Mr Percy Fenster (Dick Window in his day job?) was obviously onto something. A hero for all types, maybe. The claw marks suggest he's pretty effective anyway.

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Charles Dickens

The new Very Interesting People series from Oxford University Press provides authoritative bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures. These are people whose influence and importance have stood the test of time. Each book in the series is based on the biographical entry from the world-famous Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Michael Slater sketches the main outline of Dickens' life - the boyhood in Chatham and Rochester, his love of reading and amateur theatricals, and then the shocking, seminal event in his young life when his father was put into the Marshalsea debtor's prison and Dickens himself was set to work in a blacking factory, sticking labels on bottles. This was an event which was to shape much of his later fiction, as well as his own psychology and his attitudes to social reform... Read more >>

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Neglected writers - Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier was a Cuban writer who straddled the connection between European literature and the native culture of Latin-America. He was for a long time the Cuban cultural ambassador in Paris. He was trying to place Latin-American culture into a historical context. This was done via a conscious depiction of the colonial past - as in The Kingdom of This World, and Explosion in a Cathedral (title in Spanish El Siglo de las Luces - or The Age of Enlightenment). His literary style is a wonderful combination of dazzling images and a rich language, full of the technical jargon of whatever subject he touches on - be it music, architecture, painting, history, or agriculture ... Read more >>

Alejo Carpentier - study resources

Un-read Writers

Glancing through a weekend literary supplement at ecstatic reviews for what were quite clearly mediocre books, my thoughts turned to one of my favourite dinner table discussion points - neglected, unread, over-rated, and forgotten writers. Plunge into the bowels of any second-hand bookshop and go to the shelves marked either 'literature' or 'novels'. The same books will be there waiting for you. Oliver Wendell Holmes' The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, George Bernard Shaw's Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, Anatole France's Penguin Island, and maybe just Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns. And that's the good stuff. Doesn't your soul groan inwardly at these tired and faded spines? Don't you feel like running out to the nearest Waterstone's? Well don't bother - because they are only full of the stock which will replace this array of the great un-read.

What you have hit is the literary stratum of titles which were once important, or fashionable, or even considered 'great'. But about which nobody gives a hoot now. You would be doing the bookseller a favour by offering him tuppence for the lot so that he could refresh his stock. Don't you believe me? Well, when did you last read George Meredith or Anatole France?

The Nobel Prize for literature has been won by the unforgettable Henryk Sienkiewicz, Selma Lagerlof, Verner von Heidenstam, and Carl Spittler. And it was won as recently as 1974 by Harry Martinson. Have you ever read any of these writers? No - I thought not. And neither have I.

This is not to say that they might not have fine qualities as human beings - but for literature to endure we need something more than that. And yet the list of people who did not on the other hand win the Nobel Prize, even though they were eligible, is not endless - but it's pretty long. Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka. So even the august bodies which pontificate on literary merit get this judgement wrong - and continue to do so.

What does all this prove? Well, that taste changes; that figures thought important in one period are considered insignificant in the next. [Incidentally, this applies in the fields of art and music, as well as writing.]

The pantheon of the very great changes less rapidly than that for the also-rans. Nobody but a fool would suggest that Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Dickens, and Virginia Woolf were suddenly due to vanish from the canon. Yet all their reputations have been under attack at one time or another. Now, if my friend across the table would circulate the Port, I think we could move on to consider some unjustly neglected names.

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