Цитаты из книг — Gregg Crane

The novel's main action is repeatedly interrupted by meditations and digressions. In its fragmentary and collage-like collection of disparate materials - literary, mythic, religious, scintific, and historical - Moby-Dick has a distinctly proto-modernist aspect, resembling James Joyce's Ulysses

In terms of its allusions, Melville’s whale story can seem a veritable compendium of Western culture, calling to mind Perseus, Prometheus, Odysseus, Job, Jonah, Hamlet, Lear, Goethe’s Faust, Byron’s Childe Harold, Montaigne’s cannibals, Coleridge’s ancient mariner, and Turner’s seascapes.

Like Emerson, Hawthorne understands that our desire for “permanence” is accompanied by a different need for “circulation” and “change” (Emerson “Experience” 1196).

The Scarlet Letter does not, like The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, leave us with a mysterious connection between opposed concepts; rather, Hawthorne’s narrative implicitly argues for a salutary if difficult balance between forces pulling in opposite directions. Tradition, history, established religion, and membership…

Like Poe and Melville, Hawthorne is interested to explore what we might call ontological confusion, the exploration of whether antithetical ideas or states of being, such as love and hate, are really separated by firm and certain boundaries.

Transformation of characters, as well as of interpretations or symbolic associations, is one of Hawthorne’s major concerns in the novel. Borrowing from Coleridge’s comments on Wordsworth, we might say that Hawthorne’s romance “was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their…

While the separate identity of opposed conceptions is never erased, throughout Poe’s romance a mysterious or unseen connection, dimly felt but never fully comprehended, haunts the literal and figural polar opposites we rely on to take our bearings and navigate experience.

Simultaneously, however, Pym’s voyage to the edge of the world is a journey inward to the depths of his psyche. The voyage out is a voyage in – an exploration of the labyrinthine distortions and mutations of the human mind under extreme pressure, a recurring theme in Poe’s fiction and poetry

In Poe’s view, the artist constructs worlds of obscure or complex symbolism teasing us with suggestive glimpses of truths that remain largely and satisfyingly concealed in shadow (hence, Poe’s dislike of straightforward allegory in which the symbol too transparently represents some truth or idea – in Poe’s terms, an…

These romances don’t necessarily or flatly contradict the idealist’s vision of a two-story universe in which signs or symbols drawn from daily experience stand in some meaningful relation to larger truths; instead, the obscurity and multiple implications of their key symbols expresses their authors’ doubt that the…

Unlike the historical romance which depends for its epic effect on the reader’s ready translation of its characters into archetypes and its events into larger themes, the philosophical romance loves to confront its readers and main characters with overt but obscure symbols, such as an oddly shaped birthmark.

Writers in the nineteenth century were fond, as Leo Marx has noted, of using the phrase “The annihilation of time and space” to indicate the remarkable pace of technological progress during their era

In exploring the intersection of imagination and perception and tracing the distortion of the latter under great stress, the romance comes close to psychological realism.

Using the extraordinary and marvelous to invest otherwise prosaic events with mythic significance, the historical romancer transforms known history into legend. ... By recasting history as legend or myth, the romancer attempts to give the past an archetypal or universal significance.

While making various claims to authenticity and accuracy, such as the device of the found papers and the inclusion of historical events and realistic details, the nineteenth-century romance recounts larger-than-life tales filled with strange or astonishing events having some apparent mythic The romance significance. In…

All three types of romance – historical, philosophical, and sensational – feature the extraordinary in the form of astonishing or supernatural events, amazing escapes, unbelievably fortuitous coincidences, characters with almost superhuman abilities, shocking acts of violence, and/or otherworldly apparitions (even when…

Before the advent of realism in the latter decades of the century, the romance and the sentimental novel are, in effect, the default categories of nineteenth-century fiction.

Borrowing a phrase from Henry James’s description of the romantic, we might say that the romancer is after things “we never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire”

Famously, Nathaniel Hawthorne appreciated the romance’s “latitude” in regard to the novel’s requirement of a “minute fidelity . . . to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience” (Seven Gables 3). The romance, Hawthorne says, furnishes a theater “a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the…

Authors of nineteenth-century romances understood well that their productions represented an anomalous continuation of the epic or mythic impulse.