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History of Ideas
In Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks, Peter Gay argues against the idea that novels are accurate or objective reflections of a culture’s social, political and psychological worlds. Gay says, "[W… -
Words Words Words
In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, master of words, comments that words aren’t much good unless people bring meaning to them. But then expecting people to think is, per the caustic realist Flaubert, hoping for too much… -
Divine Comedy
Readers of a certain age may remember John Ciardi for his poem books for kids The Reason for the Pelican or I Met a Man. Other may remember him from the textbook How Does a Poem Mean. Anyway, for the sake of reading - fo… -
Best-seller of Long Ago
Christopher Morley (1890-1957) was an American novelist, essayist, and journalist. He is noted for his best-selling novel Kitty Foyle (1939) and Parnassus on Wheels (1917) plus its sequel, The Haunted Bookshop (1919). Se… -
A Scandalous High Society Triangle
American writer Louis Auchincloss was undergoing psychoanalysis in the early 1950s so his novels at that time treated the psychology of neurosis. In the short and readable 1953 novel A Law for the Lion, socialite Eloise … -
Lepidopterists Take Note
Strong Opinions is a collection of interviews, reviews, and other prose by VN. Readers of his Lectures on Literature will recall that VN loftily dismissed DH Lawrence, Dostoevsky, and Conrad. His tendency to relish sayin… -
Running Circles Around Other People
Published in 1979, The Monkey King by Timothy Mo is considered a ground-breaking novel for “ethnic” writers but the story is so universal that I think anybody can enjoy it. Set in Hong Kong in the 1950s, the story shows … -
Chills to Cool Off
M.R. James (1862 - 1936) was a mediaevalist who worked in the libraries of both Cambridge and Oxford colleges. The ghost stories that he wrote in the early part of the 20th century are still in print and still very much … -
Bleak House
I read this this as the 2nd of three for the Victorian Reading Challenge. Granted, reading a massive novel by Charles Dickens such as Bleak House has its trials. Dickens satirizes pompous lawyers’ prolonging lawsuits to … -
Doing Who You Are
In the classic Sixties novel, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, though a lecturer at a university, the title character has no desire to be an intellectual and despises the ways, airs, and idiocies of academic life. Jim is hila…
buffaloSavage
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- Name: Matt
- Birthday: 6/20/1956
- Gender: Male
- Member Since: 3/10/2004
Recent Weblogs
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Let's Talk about Procrastination Later
Mon (The Gate) is the last novel in Natsume Soseki... -
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
At the start of the Great Beastly Cultural Revolut... -
History of Ideas
In Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, ...
