Wuthering
Expectations

My experience of a novel depends as much on a sympathetic response as anyone else's.  The question is: with whom, exactly, do I need to ...

How crazy is it to say this: The development of the idea of sympathy in 19th century literature was one of the great achievements of the tim...

Really, here's the most important reason to be careful about indulging in the entirely natural impulse to sympathize with the admirable ...

I tried to do some genuine research for Sympathetic Character Week, to try to shape my rhetoric, if nothing else.  Besides Wayne Booth's...

Surely learning to meet "the others" where they live is the greatest of all gifts that powerful fiction can offer us. Wayne Boot...

I'll give you a for example. The book is Journal of  Trapper by Osborne Russell, which records the author's life and adventures a...

I'm talking about The Oregon Trail (serialized 1846-8).  I've read the book twice now and find it exciting, even thrilling in place...

That last page of Dracula .  A little epilogue by Jonathan Harker. Four paragraphs. I was joking, kind of, about the novel as a polyamoris...

In Dracula , Bram Stoker created a character and a set of images that are greater than the actual book they appear in, a feat neither small ...

Typing in triplicate!  Pretty scary stuff!  From Chapter 17 of  Dracula (1897). Dracula consists of documents.  Diaries and letters, wit...

In Theodor Storm's "A Green Leaf" (1850), a soldier is lying in the heather: The brilliant Argus-eyed butterflies fluttered up...

My enormous enthusiasm for the works of Theodor Storm has been tempered to a degree by the my most recent reading of Storm. The just republ...

July , by Theodor Storm Sounds in wind a lullaby sun shines warmly from the sky, heavy ears bend down the corn, berries ripen on the th...

For reasons only distantly related to 19th century literature, I have been reading about Native American history. I'm trying to "le...

The John Galt reading proceeds. The final pieces of the Anti-Sympathy project are falling into place. obooki extracts yet another fascinati...

First, Randall Jarrell recommends the second book of The Excursion . Second, reading The Prelude of 1850 - no, writing about it - sent m...

The fifth book of The Prelude is titled "Books". That should be a comfortable place to visit. Let's see. I saw before me stre...

The Prelude is Wordsworth's account of his artistic development, whatever it was that made him a poet. Books, for example (Book Five), ...

The Wordsworth-is-boring theme meshes nicely with the forgotten-book theme I puzzled over last week. As boring as The Prelude can be,* Word...

What can I say, it's true. He may be the most boring great poet in history. I don't want to dispute his greatness. I'd rank hi...