John Davidson A Practical Novelist

Author : Hayim Fineman
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9780282939427
Total Pages : 60 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (394 download)

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Download or read book John Davidson, a Study of the Relation of His Ideas to His Poetry (Classic Reprint) written by Hayim Fineman and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2017-10-21 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from John Davidson, a Study of the Relation of His Ideas to His Poetry John Davidson is one of a group of poets who began to attract attention in the eighteen nineties. He began to write at a time when the younger generation in England was living through a re action against Victorian literature. The younger writers Of the nineties, whether aesthetes, symbolists, realists, impressionists or Celts, agreed clearly in one respect - in reviling the taste that pre vailed in Victorian England of the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. They were all raised under the influence of Carlyle 's anti-utilitarianism and Arnold's anti-philistin'ism, and disliked intensely what they conceived to be the mid-victorian type. The mid-victorian was to them a vulgar bourgeois - a narrow minded, complacent, practical individual who edified himself by reading poetry and was Shocked by the indecencies of Ibsen, Wag ner and Zola; a person whose philosopher was Spencer because Spencer was so industriously careful; whose great intellectual novel ist was Thackeray because his characters reminded one of the com monplace people that one might have met yesterday; whose great poet was'tennyson because he was abreast of the times and always compromised; whose essayist was Macaulay because he was an Opti mist who believed that a practical millennium was at band; who created a Shakespeare in his own image, bland, gentle, amiable, a theatrical man of bourgeois tastes prudently amassing a fortune and retiring to the country to live on his income; who tinkered with corn-law reforms and model prisons because he was too timid to re model society; whose tragedy was of the Paul Dombey type; whose religion was compromisingly rational; his philosophy utilitarian; his politics liberal; his manners prudish - an old maid, stolid, seri ous, sentimental, provincial. It was a duty to discuss sex problems freely and Shock this vulgar prude with epigrams and poses and with the selecting of degenerates for heroes in novels. Strange sins and subtle moods were accordingly created largely as a reaction against the matter-of-fact moralizings of the mid-victorians. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.