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Category Archives: Literature

The Hunger for the Heroic

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

 
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
This week the text in my course on “Science Fiction in Literature and Film” is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first-published work, A Princess of Mars (1912 – original title, Under the Moons of Mars). The protagonist is John Carter, formerly of the Army of Virginia under General Lee, who, succumbing to a paralyzing gas [...]

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The Theology of Charles Dickens

Monday, November 7, 2011

 
ONE OF MY favorite works of literary criticism is G.K. Chesterton’s book on Charles Dickens. I recommended it to a reader and in return received this excellent essay. 
Greg Jinkerson writes:
I took you up on the advice to read Chesterton’s Charles Dickens, the Last of the Great Men. What an inspiration. It became obvious after one chapter [...]

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By Book or by Crook

Thursday, February 17, 2011

 
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes in response to this entry on the future of the bookstore:
Books are not indestructible, but short of tossing them into a furnace or dropping them into an industrial shredder they are difficult to annihilate. Not so the electronic file. A single electromagnetic burst over the North American continent could erase every unprotected [...]

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The Demise of the Bookstore

Thursday, February 17, 2011

 
HERE is an excellent piece by Albert Mohler reflecting on the future of bookstores. With the news that the Borders chain has filed for bankruptcy, the bookstore appears more threatened than ever as a cultural institution. Mohler explains why the bookstore can never be replaced by online retailers.
He writes:
The general wisdom seems to be that the bookstore will go the way [...]

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H.G. Wells Walks Out on The Fabians

Friday, January 21, 2011

 

H.G. WELLS, the British author, was a lifelong socialist and a member of the Fabian Society when Beatrice and Sydney Webb were its leading lights. In this excellent essay on Wells, Thomas F. Bertonneau describes the author’s encounters with the Webbs, whom he caricatured in his novel The New Machiavelli. As Mr. Bertonneau puts it,
People like the Webbs saw in dislocation and discontentment an [...]

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Ransomed

Sunday, September 5, 2010

 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
 
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes, in response to the latest post on Basil Ransom, the hero of Henry James’s novel The Bostonians and an inspiring  prototype of a man at odds with modern liberalism:
When Basil Ransom first catches sight of Verena at a séance, she is sixteen years old.  She is moreover on display as a mesmeric subject who can [...]

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The Living

Friday, December 25, 2009

In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” friends and relatives gather at a Dublin townhouse for a yearly Christmas dance at the home of the elderly Morkan sisters, Julia and Kate. The guests dance to piano waltzes played by the Morkans’ niece Mary Jane, who like her aunts is a music teacher. Freddy Malins shows up not as [...]

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“The Close and Holy Darkness”

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

 
 

 
Dylan Thomas’ poetic tale, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, is a moving evocation of Christmas from a child’s point of view. It was made into an excellent movie in 1987 starring the British actor Denholm Elliott. It is well worth purchasing and watching once a year with children or grandchildren, remarkably faithful to the text and a Christmas movie likely to survive [...]

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A Man in the Cold

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

 
The Rev. James Jackson writes:
I’ve many favorite poems about manhood, but I particularly like the attached. Robert Hayden was a student of Auden (he sounds like Auden), though he has his own style. The discussion on your blog touches many things which Hayden expresses well, so I thought you might want to share it with your [...]

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Frost on Love

Saturday, October 10, 2009

 
Robert Frost was once asked to explain the meaning of one of his poems.  He responded, “If I could have said it any better I would have.”
Frost had a very anti-modern notion of love.  He couldn’t have explained it better than this. 
Hyla Brook
By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, [...]

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The Thinking Woman’s Oprah

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

 
In a long 2002 piece, “The Rage of Virginia Woolf,” Theodore Dalrymple brilliantly captures the woman whose works have enjoyed a cult-like following for 80 years and who continues to inspire envy, snobbery and boredom in college-educated girls. He aptly calls her a ”feeler,” not a thinker. Says Dalrymple: 
For her, there was no such thing as the human condition, with [...]

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The Envy of a Sister

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

 
One little-known fact about Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own, the famous book discussed in the previous entry, is that Woolf was angry that her family spent money to send her brothers to university and  had no funds left over for her. In other words, she was envious. She hid the fact in her lectures so that [...]

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A Card Table of One’s Own

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

 
Genius, possibly mere brilliance and shining talent as well, will always be more abundant in men than in women. Perhaps this is Nature’s way of compensating men for their exclusion from the creative and imaginative art that is motherhood at its best, work that is superior to any endeavour in mere words or paint or scientific invention. All these things are ephemeral. Human beings are immortal.
Why then [...]

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