I mentioned yesterday that Caroline begins The Comforters on a retreat, and I meant the kind of retreat lay Catholics go on to get away from the world for a bit and contemplate things. Outside the time period of the novel, Caroline converted to Catholicism. Before that she was living in sin with Laurence, [...]
|
|
||||
|
Kevin asked yesterday whether I thought Edward Hyde was “purity of evil/selfishness incarnate,” and whether he had “*any* redeeming qualities.” Let’s take a look at the evidence. The first time we hear about Hyde involves a description of one of the two violent crimes he commits that are witnessed and described in the novel. [...] Back in October, as part of the Scottish literature reading challenge, Amateur Reader and Kevin of Interpolations had a series of posts on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a book I had hoped to have read by that time, especially because of my love of The Beach at Falesá and the [...] Ah, The Highland Widow. Let me count the ways in which it is awesome. First, look at that cover. We have Hesperus, not Walter Scott, to thank for that of course, but yum. (The firearms-loving consumption partner couldn’t understand why these two guns appear to be stuck in the ground. Who cares? Look at [...] For all the action I’ve given you so far, I don’t think I’ve given away really anything at all of the main plotline of the novel. If you read the book yourself, you’ll find out much faster, because Scott gives away the whole thing in his introduction. Or rather, he gives away the true [...] Yesterday, talking about some of the excellent action in The Bride of Lammermoor, I may not have mentioned that they are all also excellent scenes. One of the things most apparent for me, reading Scott for the first time, was how skilled he was. Like with Flaubert, I was reading to some extent hoping [...] I’d always thought of Sir Walter Scott as boring, probably due to too-early contact with the first few pages of Ivanhoe (and knowledge of its length), and when I began reading The Bride of Lammermoor I felt I was enjoying such things as I usually do anyhow, but that it was an awful lot [...] Almost 50 years after Herman Melville wrote Typee, which drew from his own experiences in Polynesia a few years earlier, Robert Louis Stevenson published The Beach of Falesá, one of its recognizable but much-altered descendants. In many ways the two books seem nearly opposite. Typee‘s Tommo is afraid of the natives and bent on [...] This week has been all about The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and Amateur Reader’s challenge format has been great fun. Everyone should play along! I’m certainly looking forward to more of the clishmaclaver as the year progresses. In case you’ve missed anything: I got under way with a brief [...] James Hogg was a bit of a country mouse, who barely went to school and worked as a shepherd in addition to writing in both English and Scots. He doesn’t leave his fellow country folk out of The Private Memoirs and Confessions, which includes several scenes of dialogue between the English-speaking gentry and their [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
|||
|
Copyright © 2012 bibliographing - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Recent Comments