bibliographing

It appears to be a bit of a silly season at bibliographing, what with unicorns and now this, the latest installment of Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth series of noir detective novels starring Louie Knight. I’ll let Wikipedia give some background on the series, which is:
in the style of Raymond Chandler except that the stories are incongruously [...]

How, you might ask, can there possibly be a Natural History of Unicorns? Chris Lavers takes as his point of departure the assumption that unicorn myths have their basis in real, non-unicorned beasts. The rhinoceros, the kiang, the chiru, the okapi: all have a connection with unicorn myths, and much of the book is devoted [...]

I have a nice little bookstack to report on today, after a good Saturday excursion to Powell’s. Even better, I’ve already read two of the books I picked up, including Ethan Frome (finally!).

The Provost, on top there, was a bonus found in my mailbox on returning home. I don’t remember if I knew it was [...]

I am always tickled when I find something in an old novel that mirrors an ultra-contemporary concern. Of course, most of the time it’s because the concern isn’t as ultra-contemporary as we tend to think, and the whole thing just reveals our ignorance about history. Which is all to the good. But I still wasn’t [...]

Today’s post is a question I really can’t answer. Another essay in the Norton Critical Edition (1983) of Humphry Clinker is by Wolfgang Iser, “The Generic Control of the Aesthetic Response: An Examination of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker.” Iser examines the epistolary form of Humphry Clinker and compares it with that of Richardson’s novels, and finds [...]

This method of writing to you from time to time, without any hopes of an answer, affords me, I own, some ease and satisfaction in the midst of my disquiet, as it in some degree lightens the burthen of affliction; but it is at best a very imperfect enjoyment of friendship, because it admits of [...]

Who is Matthew Bramble, and why do I love him so?
Briefly, he is a gouty, middle-aged Welsh country gentleman. He complains all the time: of being an invalid, of how awful everyone is, of the way the world is going to ruin because of the mixing of the classes, of the degeneracy of architecture, of [...]

My laziness feels boundless these days. Another Sunday, another week about to start, another week of getting nothing done. Have I suddenly become too tired to read in the evenings? Have I become too idle to work on posts on Saturday afternoons, or is Mad Men just too addictive? Even the low-budget, 70’s-era Yorkshire Dales [...]

In Owen Warland, “The Artist of the Beautiful,” Nathaniel Hawthorne has created an almost too-perfect representation of the Romantic artist. Even as a child Owen had no use for the utilitarian, even for faux-utilitarian toys. Only Beauty has ever interested him. Not fit for manual labor, he’s apprenticed to a watchmaker, learns his trade very [...]

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker has yet another variation on the epistolary structure. Matthew Bramble, Welsh country gentleman, goes on a tour of Great Britain with his old maid sister Tabitha and their niece and nephew. These four, along with Tabitha’s maid Win Jenkins, each write to a single confidant during the course of their [...]