For readers and thinkers on whom nothing is lost
For readers and thinkers on whom nothing is lost
Hello readers, A few weeks ago, I posted to this website an essay entitled ‘Henry James’ Solution to the Novel Problem’. Its main ambition was to consider the arguments put forth by Henry James in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ in a broader literary historical context, and to consider how, in the process of rebutting Walter Besant’s attempts to impose a constitution onto the process of novel writing, James […]
Read moreHello readers, I would like to welcome you to the first post on my new blog page, ‘The Scribe’s Scribblings’. Slightly unfortunately, and mostly by coincidence, I am unable to boast that this is the most important thing to happen to the UK on this particular Saturday, and yet I like to think that I’ll be able to conjure some fanfare without being overshadowed by the historic crowning of a […]
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When, in his 1884 essay ‘The Art of Fiction’, American novelist Henry James proposed his memorable mantra ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’, he was writing at a pivotal time for the novel form. Two centuries earlier, Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes and John Locke had turned their backs on rigid, pre-established traditions of thought to instead ‘Look at the facts and think for […]
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The opening line of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House states that the eponymous structure exists ‘under conditions of absolute reality’,[1] which are incompatible with the existence of live organisms. The concept of an absolute reality, a state of being that transcends the limited reach of human cognition, has provoked much philosophical and psychoanalytical debate across the centuries; by applying some of this discussion to the novel, we […]
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The interpretation of dreams is a subject that has fascinated scholars across time and provided inspiration for countless works of literature. Dante Alighieri’s eminent The Divine Comedy begins with its narrator ‘so full of sleep’ that he finds himself lost in a ‘great forest’, whilst Cicero ends his De Republica, a dialogue so rooted in the complex, rational politics of the Roman Republic, with a Platonic dream vision promising a […]
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If there was an era in which it could be argued that the mind of the modern man was born, it would be the Enlightenment period. As Pagden writes, the era ‘[stood] for the claim that all individuals have the right to shape their own end for themselves rather than let others do it for them’,[1] and as philosophers like Voltaire denounced monoliths like Christianity as a ‘long-standing infection’ whose […]
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