Favorite time period

[Dr. Hill]

Mine would have to be the mid to late 1800's, what with Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Wilde, Tolstoy, Dickens, and I'm sure there are more. Seemed like the high point in novel-writing, in the least.

What about you? What's your favorite time period for literature? :)

[mayneverhave]

Mine would have to be the mid to late 1800's, what with Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Wilde, Tolstoy, Dickens, and I'm sure there are more. Seemed like the high point in novel-writing, in the least.

What about you? What's your favorite time period for literature? :)

Don't forget Melville.

My favorite period would be the first half of the 20th century. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Mann, Yeats, Stevens, Pound, Williams (and I'm bound to have forgotten some) - and also philosophers Wittgenstein, Ayer, Russell, etc. So many writers, so many new and innovative ideas.

[wessexgirl]

Mine would have to be the mid to late 1800's, what with Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Wilde, Tolstoy, Dickens, and I'm sure there are more. Seemed like the high point in novel-writing, in the least.

What about you? What's your favorite time period for literature? :)

I'm with you. Not only the great Russian and French novelists, like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Zola, Flaubert, Hugo, de Maupassant, etc. but Dickens, Eliot, the Brontes and of course, not forgetting Hardy. Surely the century with the greatest flowering of talent ever, with regards to novel writing. That doesn't mean I don't love other periods too, but I think that the 19th century has the most of the greats.

[curlyqlink]

I agree. What was it about the 19th century... it seemed to be a high point for culture, not only in literature, but also in music and the visual arts.

I've always found it curious that while literature, music, and painting all underwent radical transformation in the early 20th century, experimenting with new forms (and in the process largely alienating themselves from the public), only literature returned to or remained in its traditional form. The 20th century novel (and the 21st) retains the form of Dickens or Flaubert.

Not so with the quirky assemblages that are modern art, or the "difficult listening hours" of modern orchestral music. "Modern", curiously, meaning works produced in the past hundred years.

[Mr Endon]

My favorite period would be the first half of the 20th century. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Mann, Yeats, Stevens, Pound, Williams (and I'm bound to have forgotten some) - and also philosophers Wittgenstein, Ayer, Russell, etc. So many writers, so many new and innovative ideas.

Interesting: that's my favourite period as well, but I'd list early Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Kafka, Kharms, Pessoa, Lawrence, Orwell, Synge (though I've only read The Playboy of the Western World) and even Remarque (only read Im Westen Nichts Neues). From my favourite authors only Dostoevsky is left out.

[kelby_lake]

Yep, first half of 20th century, in particular the first three decades.

[mayneverhave]

Interesting: that's my favourite period as well, but I'd list early Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Kafka, Kharms, Pessoa, Lawrence, Orwell, Synge (though I've only read The Playboy of the Western World) and even Remarque (only read Im Westen Nichts Neues). From my favourite authors only Dostoevsky is left out.

Of course I forgot people - but its a testament to the times that there are too many writers to list. I also left out Rilke.

[cute angel]

Generally I don't have a preferable era because there are marvellous writers in each period I may say the 14th century coz of Chauser or the 19th because of Charlotte Bronte and so on

[Mr Endon]

mayneverhave, I wasn't chastising you for having forgotten the ones I mentioned, I was just surprised that my list was so different yet from the same period. Probably because my literary interests have narrowed somewhat lately (The Absurd in Literature is my new Bible).

[this reminds me: Camus, Camus.]

Rilke's 'Der Panther' is my favourite poem in German, a shame that I forgot about him.

[mayneverhave]

mayneverhave, I wasn't chastising you for having forgotten the ones I mentioned, I was just surprised that my list was so different yet from the same period. Probably because my literary interests have narrowed somewhat lately (The Absurd in Literature is my new Bible).

[this reminds me: Camus, Camus.]

Rilke's 'Der Panther' is my favourite poem in German, a shame that I forgot about him.

No worries. I didn't take it as a chastisement - sorry if my response sounded defensive. I also forgot Henry James; this is getting ridiculous.

I also went through a long Camus period. I've somewhat cooled toward Existentialism lately, however. Absurdism is still fine, however.

[Mr Endon]

No worries. I didn't take it as a chastisement - sorry if my response sounded defensive. I also forgot Henry James; this is getting ridiculous.

I also went through a long Camus period. I've somewhat cooled toward Existentialism lately, however. Absurdism is still fine, however.

No need to apologise. Your remark really wasn't defensive at all, I just overread it.

Am I bizarre for having been somewhat disappointed with The Plague? It's a good book, mind you, but I kept comparing it to 1984, for some reason.

Never read Henry James, and I know this is a terrible fault. My father says his Tropic of Cancer is pornography, but he's a man of extremes.

Sorry for having hijacked this thread, but there are more important things in life than being self-restrained.

[wessexgirl]

I think Tropic of Cancer is Henry Miller Mr Endon.

[Mr Endon]

Dear me, you're right! I associate Henry James more with the 19th century, I guess. Lamentable mistake. Well, life goes on.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Yeah, I'll go for the 19th century as well, it has everything. You can have Romanticism and late Victorian literature, what more could you want?

[The Comedian]

Yeah, I'll go for the 19th century as well, it has everything. You can have Romanticism and late Victorian literature, what more could you want?

I'm with Neely on this one -- Romanticism alone would hold me in this century. Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, John Westley Powell, a couple of the British guys and gals (I forget their names) (*winks at the Brits*)

Good Hunting!

[Wilde woman]

Gee, I feel like a fish out of water. I like the oooooold stuff. My favorite eras are the Classical and medieval.

Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Virgil, Catullus, Ovid and on into Chaucer, Gower, Dante, Petrarch, Malory, Chretien, and anything Arthurian. To me, these guys were the master stylists and they were so influential towards everything else that came later. My favorite novels came later (obviously, the novel wasn't even born yet), mostly in the Romantic period, but my academic interests lie with these oldies. Oldies but goodies. :D

[stlukesguild]

I've always found it curious that while literature, music, and painting all underwent radical transformation in the early 20th century, experimenting with new forms (and in the process largely alienating themselves from the public), only literature returned to or remained in its traditional form. The 20th century novel (and the 21st) retains the form of Dickens or Flaubert.

Not so with the quirky assemblages that are modern art, or the "difficult listening hours" of modern orchestral music. "Modern", curiously, meaning works produced in the past hundred years.

Of course this is a questionable assertion. For all the innovations of Picasso, Matisse... even Rothko and DeKooning, they are still deeply rooted in the traditions of Western Art... indeed, far more so than many Post-Modernists (beginning with Warhol) that have little connection with this tradition and far more with popular culture and the mass media. An artist who looks so far removed from the whole of Western Art as Mark Rothko is deeply indebted to the Romantic landscape tradition of Turner, Friederich, and even Monet. For every apparent iconoclast one might also do well to remember that there are artists of great merit working far more obviously within the tradition. In art we have Andrew Wyeth, Lucian Freud, Chuck Close, Giorgio Morandi, William Bailey, William Beckmann, etc... Within music... for every Ligetti or Stockhausen or Shoenberg... we have a Rachmaninoff, Puccini, Vaughan-Williams, Richard Strauss, Carl Orff, Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, etc...

[stlukesguild]

My own preference? Such would be a difficult choice. I am greatly drawn to writers of the period referred to as the "baroque" in the visual arts. This would include Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Cervantes, Thomas Traherne, Milton, Moliere, Racine, Robert Herrick, Luis de Gongora, Montaigne, Pierre Ronsard, Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, John Donne, etc... Certainly a formidable lot. At the same time I am greatly attracted to the Romantic era that would include: Blake, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Robert Burns, John Clare, Rousseau, Goethe, Novalis, Holderlin, etc... to name only poets. Again a strong bunch. I may just go with Modernism... the dates of which are arguable... but I'll go with those critics who place Baudelaire as the first "Modern" poet and end with WWII (or thereabout). This would give me Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, Valery, Camus, Proust, Genet, Garcia-Lorca, Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernandez, Fernando Pessoa, Jorge Guillen, Rafael Alberti, Rilke, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, Bulgakov, Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Faulkner, Hemingway, J.L. Borges... to barely scrape the surface. Yes... I think I'd go with Modernism.

[loe]

Like many of you I also prefer the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th century.
(my favourites are Dostoevsky, Proust and many more)

Maybe it's easier to identify with the writings of that time. Language/style of expression and also the stories/the lives aren't so completely different to ours?

Best regards

[amalia1985]

Early Modern period, 19th and the first half of the 20th century.

[bazarov]

19th century.

[andave_ya]

Mine would have to be the mid to late 1800's, what with Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Wilde, Tolstoy, Dickens, and I'm sure there are more. Seemed like the high point in novel-writing, in the least.


Ditto. I like the 1930's, too. Yeats, Tolkien, Sayers, Christie, Chesterton and the others i've forgotten....

[JuniperWoolf]

Gee, I feel like a fish out of water. I like the oooooold stuff. My favorite eras are the Classical and medieval.

I'm with you. I choose the classical period of ancient Greece (470-323BC). If I were alive during that time, I'd want to be a male civilian of Athens.

[googlesque]

i will always have a love for the great 19th century russian writers....pushkin, gogol, lermontov, turgenev, tolstoy, dostoevski, chekov...

for me its because the russian writers of that century seemed to have a mindset both medieval and modern... they go from pushkins pastoral to dostoevskis urban to chekhovs stoic realism. and in all of them, generally speaking, they have a sincere respect of the folk attitude not seen in any of the other national literatures of the time... imo. they seemd not to have have so much investment of ego... but a social desire for a better society. or at least thats the essence of there writings to me. plus the russian sense of humor i enjoy alot.

[kelby_lake]

I like 2nd generation romantics- shelley, keats, and byron- and bits and pieces from all over time.

However I think in the 20th century literature started to lose some of its pretentions and confines and became more honest and direct.

[stlukesguild]

Kelby... do you honestly think that W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, Pablo Neruda, or any number of other major figures of 20th century literature had lessened "pretentions"... imagined less of their art? Do you seriously think that james Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Paul Eluard, Miguel Hernandez, J.L. Borges, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Faulkner were more "direct" than their predecessors? As for "honesty"... what the hell does "honesty" have to do with art? Art is all illusion... as in artifice and artificial. Artists revel in the illusion... in the beauty of language and the forms... in invention. What is "honest" about Fernando Pessoa hiding behind multiple personas... J.L. Borges, Kafka, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, etc... with their layers of smoke and mirrors blurring one layer of fiction from the next?

[mayneverhave]

I like 2nd generation romantics- shelley, keats, and byron- and bits and pieces from all over time.

However I think in the 20th century literature started to lose some of its pretentions and confines and became more honest and direct.

Yes, and, not to jump all over you, but, with the work of T.S. Eliot specifically, the gap between the lowbrow and highbrow reader, the commerical artist vs. the Artist was wider than it had ever been.

[JBI]

It's actually quite difficult, because one really needs to think, for instance, that Ferdowsi and Li Bei were writing at the same time period (technically at least) as the Njal saga compilers (who were working orally), while the bulk of Europe was in a rather dark and empty literary period. In truth, time periods are very rooted in geographical borders, well at least until recently, and the first really powerful movement (note, movement not time period) to sort of break things was Modernism - which really shook up the bulk of the world (places as different as Russia, The U.S., China and Brazil included), though couldn't possibly be called a time period by any rational standards, as the results were so different, and in completely different directions.

Do periods really exist though? That is a very difficult question. Certainly, I would be very hard pressed to describe the current time as a "period". I think period requires a time-based society, whereas our society is too spatially oriented. You really need a strong structuring force, like the church, or in general an oral tradition to really build a "period", in the sense that the Middle Ages were a "time period", or the Renaissance is (though there has been enough ink spilled arguing against the actual "time period" nature of both of these).


As for the short answer though, I'm attracted to the current, and I would hope most people are, as there is much good there, and a lot more youthfulness in the current (and it makes things difficult, and rather dull when people like classical models more than their own, as seen, for instance, in the literature of the late 17th, and early 18th century in England and Italy). Generally though, in terms of "period" or movement, we live in a pretty darn good one - the vast range of availability alone is staggering - now one can read about any part of the world really, because of the improvement in communications and translation.

[Mr Endon]

As for "honesty"... what the hell does "honesty" have to do with art? Art is all illusion... as in artifice and artificial. Artists revel in the illusion... in the beauty of language and the forms... in invention. What is "honest" about Fernando Pessoa hiding behind multiple personas... J.L. Borges, Kafka, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, etc... with their layers of smoke and mirrors blurring one layer of fiction from the next?

Interesting. However. D. H. Lawrence advocates for the novel's honesty: 'the honour, which the novel demands of you, is only that you shall be true to the flame that leaps in you'.

Beckett's word for it is 'integrity'; 'The moan I have more & more to make with [my writing] is there - that it is nearly all triggered up, [...] heat of friction and not the spontaneous combustion of the spirit'. He thinks all good writing (like Dante's) arises from a necessity, and the work of art that is contrived, that isn't honest - i.e. necessary - is irremediably bad.

Daniil Kharms was a fierce believer in integrity: 'He threw nothing away; if it was written, he'd have to live with it. Instead, he crossed out many texts in blue or red pencil and sometimes even labeled them in the margins - some "so-so", others simply "awful" or "wrong" '.

So this is how I'd define honesty in art. I believe the concept of 'honesty' was alive and well in many writers. The Fernando Pessoa mention is, I'll admit, very valid to your point (his most famous poem starts with the line 'The poet is a pretender'); yet I don't think that his heternoyms were contrived, much less controled. They were explorations of his own psyche, of his own quest for self-expression (the poem continues: 'He pretends so completely, / That he even pretends that it is grief / The grief which he really feels').

[Tallgren]

I'd go for the first half of the 20th century, like many others.

Hemingway, Woolf, Steinbeck. And Orwell, certainly. While Animal Farm and 1984 may overshadowed by everything else he did, I've enjoyed everything I've read by him. Just finished Burmese Days, nothing spectacular but enjoyable.

[JBI]

Interesting. However. D. H. Lawrence advocates for the novel's honesty: 'the honour, which the novel demands of you, is only that you shall be true to the flame that leaps in you'.

Beckett's word for it is 'integrity'; 'The moan I have more & more to make with [my writing] is there - that it is nearly all triggered up, [...] heat of friction and not the spontaneous combustion of the spirit'. He thinks all good writing (like Dante's) arises from a necessity, and the work of art that is contrived, that isn't honest - i.e. necessary - is irremediably bad.

Daniil Kharms was a fierce believer in integrity: 'He threw nothing away; if it was written, he'd have to live with it. Instead, he crossed out many texts in blue or red pencil and sometimes even labeled them in the margins - some "so-so", others simply "awful" or "wrong" '.

So this is how I'd define honesty in art. I believe the concept of 'honesty' was alive and well in many writers. The Fernando Pessoa mention is, I'll admit, very valid to your point (his most famous poem starts with the line 'The poet is a pretender'); yet I don't think that his heternoyms were contrived, much less controled. They were explorations of his own psyche, of his own quest for self-expression (the poem continues: 'He pretends so completely, / That he even pretends that it is grief / The grief which he really feels').

The honesty you speak of is simply a lack of questioning of the mimetic divide between fact and fiction. It isn't honesty, merely not saying that you are lying, whereas today authors generally admit they are liars.

[Mr Endon]

JBI, I may have misunderstood your point, but I think you divide fact and fiction in too stringent a manner. As I've said, Kharms believed the written word to be an action, and once he wrote a story he wouldn't change a comma. The written word was an object for him - you can't get more factual about writing than this. I mean, if this isn't honesty I'm not sure what is. Unless you're suggesting that there's no honesty possible in fiction because there's no fact in fiction? That's oversimplifying matters.

[stlukesguild]

Do periods really exist though? That is a very difficult question. Certainly, I would be very hard pressed to describe the current time as a "period". I think period requires a time-based society, whereas our society is too spatially oriented. You really need a strong structuring force, like the church, or in general an oral tradition to really build a "period", in the sense that the Middle Ages were a "time period", or the Renaissance is (though there has been enough ink spilled arguing against the actual "time period" nature of both of these).

Some interesting thoughts... but one might argue for the exact opposite: the past (well from the Renaissance at least) being spatially oriented and Modernism being rooted in time. This has been the argument as just what exactly the great shift was in the visual arts (centering on Cubism) from the Renaissance to Modernism. The primary concerns of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance culture was space. The wars were continually fought over space... territories. Property was a measure of wealth. Art was primarily concerned with the representation of space: perspective, the illusion of 3-dimensional form, etc... With Modernism space began to contract. Asia, Africa, the Americas, etc... had once been as foreign as if they were located on another planet. The vast majority never traveled more than a few miles from the place of their birth. With the innovations of steam ships, trains, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, telegraphs, etc... space and distance began to hold less importance. The issue now became speed and time. The fragmentation of of a great deal of Modern art owes much to the sense that past certainties (such as Space) were coming apart at the seams while the increasing drive for speed was leading to an even greater sense of disorientation.

'the honour, which the novel demands of you, is only that you shall be true to the flame that leaps in you'.

Beckett's word for it is 'integrity'; 'The moan I have more & more to make with [my writing] is there - that it is nearly all triggered up, [...] heat of friction and not the spontaneous combustion of the spirit'. He thinks all good writing (like Dante's) arises from a necessity, and the work of art that is contrived, that isn't honest - i.e. necessary - is irremediably bad.

I'm still having a problem with this notion of what exactly amounts to "honesty" in art. Only that which arises from "necessity" is good art? But "necessity" to whom? Are we talking of what is necessary to the artist?... the larger culture?... the patron?... the audience? Under the Romantic ideal the poet only creates when touched by inspiration and has a single unique true "voice". Yet even Wordsworth edited and revised the prelude several times. Baudelaire and Whitman did likewise. Yeats and T.S. Eliot both allowed for revisions and suggestions from Ezra Pound. Michelangelo created perhaps the central work of Western painting under duress... arguing that he was no painter. And Shakespeare?... he almost certainly put his work through multiple revisions and editing in response to audience reaction. The Romantic notion would have us think that the work of art is an expression of the artist that will broach no change... nothing not true to the artist's original vision. To be otherwise is to create an art that is "contrived"... but could anything be more contrived than Virgil's Aeneid?... than Borges' fictions within fictions... than Lawrence Sterne?

[Mr Endon]

I'd like you to forget I mentioned Lawrence, as I don't know enough about him to make a judgement. He talks a lot about honesty in his essays but I never do know if I'm supposed to take his wild assertions at face value.

As for Beckett's "necessity" and "contriteness", what he means is that only that which the writer must articulate is worthy of being written, as opposed to something which one forces himself to write. Inasmuch as it is related to "integrity" it is akin to the Romantic idea of the genius, but that's the only similarity I can see.

I'm not saying that Pound and Yeats and Eliot and all the others you listed are insincere because they revised and edited their texts; Beckett had always done that himself. What I'm asserting is merely that there are modernist writers who believed fiction can, nay must, be "honest". The definition of "honesty", however, varies from writer to writer, just like any given definition, and that's why I presented three separate quotations. For example, Beckett might find Balzac "dishonest" (I don't know about that, I just know he wasn't a fan of him), whereas because he revises his texts Kharms would not have deemed his way of writing honest.

Well I've made an awful mess of this idea, and I can only hope this makes sense to you.

[stlukesguild]

I question this issue of "honesty" because it seems to go against my own experience as a visual artist... or at least it does as I interpret it. We have the Romantic ideal of creating in which the artist only creates when touched by inspiration or the muses... only when he or she feels the need. Art is self-expression and something that must be conveyed. This goes completely against my own experiences which fall more along the lines of what is suggested in Picasso's aphorism: "Inspiration exists, but it has got to find you working." Following this belief the artist does sometimes force him or herself to create. Its their job. Sometimes the inspiration strikes... other-times not... but Picasso would suggest that the artist has a far greater chance of being struck by inspiration while working... and I tend to concur.

So what works are more or less honest? In one way Picasso is completely honest in that like a child (almost) he lets everything stand. He rarely goes back to "correct" something. Thus we are presented with the good, the bad, and the ugly. The polish of Nabokov, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and many others, however may mirror another "honesty"... a brutal self-editing in which the artist refuses to let anything stand that seems superfluous... non essential to the intention... or simply not up to par.

[mayneverhave]

I believe the issue here is whether "forced" art is of any less quality than easy and inspired art. Not only are the two distinctions often blured, but I would argue that they have no bearing whatsoever on the audience to the art, in our judgement of the art.

I have written short stories that have required months of rewrites, and on-going revisions that have lasted years, and then short stories that have been written in the space of an hour or less. Either method is no guaruntee of the quality of the work.

The oft-told factoid of how Pound assisted Eliot on The Waste Land is interesting - as I am interested in stories about artists - but hardly comes into play when I am valuing the poem itself. I do not care if part of Dover Beach was written on Arnold's honeymoon, whether Byron literarly wrote Don Juan with no direction in mind, or if Shakespeare's plays were written by 10 different writers. They do not figure into my estimation of the art.

[JBI]

Some interesting thoughts... but one might argue for the exact opposite: the past (well from the Renaissance at least) being spatially oriented and Modernism being rooted in time. This has been the argument as just what exactly the great shift was in the visual arts (centering on Cubism) from the Renaissance to Modernism. The primary concerns of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance culture was space. The wars were continually fought over space... territories. Property was a measure of wealth. Art was primarily concerned with the representation of space: perspective, the illusion of 3-dimensional form, etc... With Modernism space began to contract. Asia, Africa, the Americas, etc... had once been as foreign as if they were located on another planet. The vast majority never traveled more than a few miles from the place of their birth. With the innovations of steam ships, trains, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, telegraphs, etc... space and distance began to hold less importance. The issue now became speed and time. The fragmentation of of a great deal of Modern art owes much to the sense that past certainties (such as Space) were coming apart at the seams while the increasing drive for speed was leading to an even greater sense of disorientation.


In that sense, perhaps, but I meant it in a sense of coherent diological movement, whereas modernism, from the way I understand it, essentially blew everything into bits in many, many directions. Perhaps the Great War did create a sort of period - it certainly was short, and geographically limited, but when I think of Period, I like to think of something that really binds itself to time - something like the Han Dynasty of China, for instance, seems more like a period than Victorian England. But even those are spatially bound. A more accurate period, for instance, would be something like the Bronze Age, which really bound itself to time, and showed a single period, spanning over thousands of years. But that is oral - things weren't written, so it cannot be called a literary period.

Then, with literary, you would really need something that binds itself timeward, but doesn't fluctuate and change so quickly. The closest thing, I think, we have, is Homer, who is a remnant of that sort of tradition, but that is merely a hint - the Homeric Period, if you will, has been lost, and only a suggestion of one has remained intact.


The Modernist period was changing every second, to the point where someone like Ezra Pound must have recreated himself at least 50 times. There isn't a sense of period there, as much as there is a sense of technological change. Would we call ourselves though, the "Internet period"? Could we call the Industrial revolution a period? Well, perhaps, but that to me seems spatially based too, and seems to have changed from one day to the next, from Steam Engine, to Southland Clearings, to The Light Bulb, and when you get it down to literature, I highly doubt you could make a case for there being a period there - especially one that isn't bound to a country, or even a regime.

Text works better with space, ultimately, but somehow certain texts historically had power over time, such as Dante, mostly because of their incredible quality, and lack of other voices (in addition to lack of literacy). When oral communication is dominant over text, a period is able to assemble itself, between major changes (an ice age being, for example, a major change, or the discovery of Gunpowder). Beowulf, I would say, more or less speaks for a period, but even Beowulf, again, is just a remnant of a period - only one spec of it.

There probably hasn't been a period since then - perhaps in remoter places in the world, where influences haven't come, yet some form of literacy manifested itself.

The term then, "period piece" today, means something very different, because of our understanding of period. I would call a period piece something that lasts 5 years. Harry Potter got lucky, as it has been perpetuated by its number of volumes and movies, but I think the lack of interest in it currently is showing this to be somewhat true.

In one of my brothers classes in high school, he told me, his English was reading the school newspaper, and stumbled upon a spoiler for the new Twilight movie. She then began to curse, and shout about how you shouldn't put spoilers. Another kid then, just sitting there, blurted out, "Dumbledore Dies". Nobody jumped, or reacted - there wasn't any gasp or emotion - the period of that being relevant had ended.

So in a sense, one can attribute a period to a time, but I would argue, because of the written-bias over oral, a period, if it does exist, lasts a very, very short time (perhaps even months), and is definitely not coherent. The whole notion of "Spirit of the Age" has become dated, as an age, or a coherent sense of spirit is ridiculous. One minute people feel one thing about another, the next week, another story is published, and people's opinions change over night. Time binding, for the most part, has been reduced to conversation once. People will talk about the new X or new Y for maybe 10 minutes the day after they hear about it (even all over a nation), and then, time moves on. It would seem, that a period has become, if such a notion makes sense at all (since after all, periods, even in the classical sense, are subject to geographical limitations), lasting about as long as the newest gossip lasts.


That being said, perhaps period stretching lasted longer in the past - and probably the further back you go, the longer periods were, as text has only become more and more dominant, but the Romantic Period - how long would you say it was? 10 years? 5 years? Certainly there must be a distinction between the periods of just before the French Revolution, the French Revolution, The Post-French Revolution, The Napoleonic period, and so on. Wordsworth is not part of the same time period really, as someone like Keats, or Shelley (I would argue P. Shelley wasn't in the same time period as M. Shelley).


Lets take it back more then - are we to say that Marlowe was in the same Period as Spenser? Was Spenser in the same period as Wyatt? How about Shakespeare in the same period as Marlowe? Fletcher in the same period as Shakespeare? Milton in the same period as Fletcher? And on and on it goes - there seems to be about a 20-30 year gap in periodic space there. If we take it back to 1400, I'd say there would be a 100 or so time period length, and back to 500, I would say a period lasting 200-300 years. Take that back all the way to 1000 BCE, and you have a period perhaps lasting half a millennium.

[Quark]

The whole notion of "Spirit of the Age" has become dated, as an age, or a coherent sense of spirit is ridiculous.

I agree--at least with this part of the post (the oral/literate argument seems a little harebrained). Ages and periods, like the Victorian Age or the Romantic Period, seem like ad hoc simplifications of the actual history of literature. This appears to be the position of many scholars, as well. People are abandoning the concept of a coherent period. Take JBI's example, the Romantic Period. In the middle of twentieth century there were many arguments about what constituted Romanticism. There's a famous one actually between Rene Wellek and A.O. Lovejoy. The assumption was that there are certain attributes that define writers in the early nineteenth century, and that everyone contemporary with that period must share them--even authors like Jane Austen who clearly have some other agenda. Recently, though, critics have backed off. To say that there is one set of attributes that defines writers from this period would be to gloss over all the complexity of the time. For the Romantic period, it glosses over the many movements that differentiated writers from that time. In 1990 Marilyn Butler said something similar in "Romanticism in England:"


English Romanticism is impossible to define with historical precision because the term itself is historically unsound. It is now applied to English writers of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, who did not think of themselves as Romantics. Instead they divided themselves by literary precept and by ideology into several distinct groups, dubbed by their opponents "Lakeists," "Cockneys," Satanists," Scotsmen. It was the middle of the nineteenth century before they were gathered into one band as the English Romantics, and the present tendency of textbooks to insist upon the resemblance to one another of (especially) six major poets--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats--dates only from about 1940.

Most now only use the term Romantic to refer to any writer between the French Revolution and the Reform Bill. The term Romanticism really doesn't mean anything beyond 1787-1832. I think we can use period terms in this way. We can say "I like the writings between 1787-1832 because of X, Y, or Z texts that I just read." This is exactly what the OP did:


Mine would have to be the mid to late 1800's, what with Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Wilde, Tolstoy, Dickens, and I'm sure there are more. Seemed like the high point in novel-writing, in the least.

Dr. Hill just pointed to a segment of history and some writers. I think when you start ascribing qualities to a period is when this falls apart. Saying that Modernists were more "honest" might be crossing the line. Obviously, to say that a period is better than another begs justification. You have to give some reason for why the period you suggest is better than all others, but I think those reasons should be grounded in texts and not the time period. Stlukesguild suggested earlier that time periods could be distinguished from each other by historical events--like the change in society's perception of space--but I think this would take us back in the wrong direction. We would end up with simplifications again. We would end up trying to shove Jane Austen in with Shelley and Wordsworth again. It's better if you do as the OP did and look at particular works.

[stlukesguild]

I agree--at least with this part of the post (the oral/literate argument seems a little harebrained). Ages and periods, like the Victorian Age or the Romantic Period, seem like ad hoc simplifications of the actual history of literature. This appears to be the position of many scholars, as well. People are abandoning the concept of a coherent period...

J.L. Borges (I warned you that I was a fanatic) has a fabulous tale entitled The Memorious Funes. In this tale Borges posits the idea of an individual unable to think or perceive in terms of abstractions and simplifications. He is unable to perceive or comprehend that two different beings are both "dogs" because to him each organism has far more differences than similarities... each organism is unique. By the same token, while looking to the sky he cannot fathom "clouds" because each entity he sees there is completely different from the others... and each continues to change each and every second.

Abstractions or simplifications are a necessity if we are to comprehend the world about us. "Dog" and "cloud" are no less an abstraction than "Romanticism" or "Modernism". These abstractions are an attempt at making sense... giving some sort of order to the vast chaos that is Life and "Art" and "Literature" (which are again abstractions). Certainly, these abstractions are grossly limited/limiting... but they are certainly a necessity as well. If I take the term "Impressionism" for example I am most probably referring to a group of artists working within a narrow time frame who shared certain common elements and goals. Unlike a broader term like "Modernism", "Impressionism" denotes (largely) a group of artists who exhibited together, shared ideas, ate and drank together, and even (at times) painted together. In spite of this, the reality is that once we delve into their work more deeply we find that there were probably more dissimilarities than commonalities. Manet and Degas, for example, far preferred the human subject matter to the landscape (which most think of in connection with Impressionism). Degas' work was composed in many ways in the manner of the traditional figure painter unlike Monet's loose, organic compositions. Degas actually disliked Monet's work intensely and even suggested that the police should start shooting all those plein air landscape artists.

The point, of course, is that there are undoubted differences between Byron, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats (to say nothing of Goethe, Novalis, Holderlin, Emerson, etc...). One discovers that in spite of living and working in close proximity in terms of time, these poets present vastly different and unique views. I'm uncertain, however, whether there is much value in simply presenting the continuum of art and literary history as one vast chaotic collection of individuals without any suggestions of order or structure.

[Quark]

J.L. Borges (I warned you that I was a fanatic) has a fabulous tale entitled The Memorious Funes.

I haven't read that one actually. Is it any good? My favorite period probably wouldn't be in the twentieth century, but I've been wanting to read some more short story writers from that time.


Abstractions or simplifications are a necessity if we are to comprehend the world about us. "Dog" and "cloud" are no less an abstraction than "Romanticism" or "Modernism".

I'm uncertain, however, whether there is much value in simply presenting the continuum of art and literary history as one vast chaotic collection of individuals without any suggestions of order or structure.

Well I think that may be a false choice. Just because time periods are poor categories doesn't make literature a "vast chaotic collection." And, just because I question one abstraction doesn't mean I'm saying that no one can use them. What I'm saying is that time periods are losing their meaning, and are being replaced by other, perhaps more accurate, categories. The quotations from Marilyn Butler that referred to above suggests that movements as defined by contemporaries are better categories than time periods. She wants to substitute "Satanist," "Cockney," "Lakeist," and Scotsman for Romantic. Impressionism is a category like this. It's a movement defined by contemporaries. I don't necessarily know whether this is the best way to go about categorizing, either, but it is another way. All I'm arguing is that time periods don't carry much meaning by themselves. The only reason they continue to have so much sway is that anthologizes need to be organized and scholars need specializations. Otherwise, we would hardly think to call the Modernist more "honest" than any other time period.

That being said, I think one can answer the question posed by the thread without any problems. The first twenty or so posters before this digression on categories had it exactly right. They name a period and gave a few titles or authors from that time they liked. One of my favorite periods would be the Golden Era from Russian Lit--late 19th C stuff. I'm a huge Chekhov fan, particularly. I like how the stories are powerful, yet unpretentious.

[kelby_lake]

Yes, and, not to jump all over you, but, with the work of T.S. Eliot specifically, the gap between the lowbrow and highbrow reader, the commerical artist vs. the Artist was wider than it had ever been.

Yes, I am aware of Eliot/Beckett/The other authors who like to confuse people, but they had the freedom to choose to do that- they weren't conforming to a general style. The majority of 20th century literature is at first simpler to understand and connect with than the lengthier wordier books (no, this isn't necessarily a bad thing that they are long, before I get attacked)- literature is no longer only the domain of the intellectuals. Tragedy now happens to the common man instead of kings and generals.


Art is all illusion... as in artifice and artificial.

Yes, literature is art, and yes, art is artifice, but good literature is disguised as a lie; bad literature is a lie.

[stlukesguild]

Yes, I am aware of Eliot/Beckett/The other authors who like to confuse people, but they had the freedom to choose to do that- they weren't conforming to a general style. The majority of 20th century literature is at first simpler to understand and connect with than the lengthier wordier books...

I don't imagine that T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, or any number of others were at all attempting to confuse their audience. Rather, I imagine that the form of their work was a result of their attempt to give a form that made sense to the world as they experienced it: fragmented... disjointed... unreal... etc...

Again I'm not at all certain that 20th century literature is is any way easier to understand than earlier literature. Looking to the major poets of the century... Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, Pessoa, Rilke, Valery, Apollinaire, Pasternak, Paul Eluard, Miguel Hernandez, Eugenio Montale, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, etc... I don't see anyone of them that I find simpler to understand than Keats, Shelley, Goethe, Herrick, Wordsworth, Byron, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, etc... Indeed, I find that whether we are talking great poetry from the Renaissance or today it is equally demanding because it is a language of great compression... a language that is often far removed from common speech... a language that demands much in understanding of form, symbolism, metaphor, etc...

I'm not certain that the best of 20th century prose is any less demanding... any simpler. Is James Joyce simple? Samuel Beckett? Thomas Mann? Hermann Hesse? William Faulkner? Julio Cortazar? Gabriel Garcia-Marquez? J.L. Borges? Kafka? Thomas Pynchon? John Barth? Are any of these seriously less demanding than A Tale of Two Cities, the tales of Hawthorne or Checkov or Turgenev or Robert Louis Stevenson or even Robinson Crusoe? Again, I can imagine that the archaisms of older literature may present a barrier... but that is the fault of the reader not the author... and even so I find just as much older work that is brilliantly accessible as there is among modern and contemporary writing... and just as much that is dauntingly difficult and demanding.

As for the length... that is a complete non-issue. Proust's In Search of Lost Time is as lengthy as anything excepting perhaps (only perhaps) Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There are any number of other lengthy Modern novels: Dos Passos' USA, Thomas Wolfe produced not only Look Homeward Angel (which was cut by over 100 pages) but also the manuscript, The October Fair which rivaled Proust in length. It was never published in its entirety but at least 3 large novels were mined from it: Of Time and the River, The Web and the Rock, and You Can't Go Home Again. Tomas Mann wrote not only the lengthy Magic Mountain and Doktor Faustus but also the 4 volume epic Joseph and His Brothers. Faulkner was certainly no slacker to length and neither was Lawrence, Pynchon, Barth, Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, etc... On the other hand, there is certainly more than enough great literature from before the 20th century that is quite short comparatively: A Tale of Two Cities, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Humphry Clinker, Frankenstein, Dracula, Silas Marner, Pride and Prejudice, the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Turgenev, Checkov, Hawthorne, Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Gautier, H.G. Wells, etc...

[Nightshade]

Well I seem to be well and truly in the minority, I am a fan of the long 18th century ( 1660-1830/ 1662-1832, depending on whihc authority you use) Defoe, Burney, Peyps, Edgeworth, Austen , Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft ( the elder) walter scott. and so many many more Ive forgotten.
I like a lot of 19th and 20th centurey stuiff as well of course some of my favourite books in fact, and thers no beeting the 70s and 80s and early 90s for a specfic type of fantasy novel ( although I cant for the life of me think what they are called) but I do so love the long 18th.
:D

[mortalterror]

I question this issue of "honesty" because it seems to go against my own experience as a visual artist...

I recently saw the Larry King interview with Marlon Brando, and he made a remark which I think has very striking implications for artistic expression.

LARRY: She taught you to impersonate?
MARLON: How to be aware of my own feelings. And how to access my own feelings. Many actors can do that. I'm sure you've seen pictures of, actors that uh, I mean you've seen a performance of an actor who really gave his all. He was really effective but he was ugly. He was ugly in the expression of his emotion; or he was truly being himself but what he was was boring.

I've noticed that myself, not just in acting, but in a range of arts. There was a fellow I read in a Scandinavian literature class who did naturalism better than I've ever seen it done; but his book was incredibly boring. He had no ideas, no interesting characters, no real style to speak of, just a slavish imitation of reality. It's not enough to be true. One has to be novel, or extraordinary in order to move people. Sometimes you see someone really pouring everything they've got into just the ugliest, most hackneyed creations, and the thing they are so proud of isn't the slightest bit original or profound, but it's them to a t.

I believe you are fond of quoting Oscar Wilde who said that all bad art is sincere. I don't know how we ever got to such a pass where authenticity is revered as the highest mark of genius, when few things are as diverting as a well told lie.

[kelby_lake]

Yes, I am aware of Eliot/Beckett/The other authors who like to confuse people, but they had the freedom to choose to do that- they weren't conforming to a general style. The majority of 20th century literature is at first simpler to understand and connect with than the lengthier wordier books...

I don't imagine that T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, or any number of others were at all attempting to confuse their audience. Rather, I imagine that the form of their work was a result of their attempt to give a form that made sense to the world as they experienced it: fragmented... disjointed... unreal... etc...

Again I'm not at all certain that 20th century literature is is any way easier to understand than earlier literature. Looking to the major poets of the century... Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, Pessoa, Rilke, Valery, Apollinaire, Pasternak, Paul Eluard, Miguel Hernandez, Eugenio Montale, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, etc... I don't see anyone of them that I find simpler to understand than Keats, Shelley, Goethe, Herrick, Wordsworth, Byron, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, etc... Indeed, I find that whether we are talking great poetry from the Renaissance or today it is equally demanding because it is a language of great compression... a language that is often far removed from common speech... a language that demands much in understanding of form, symbolism, metaphor, etc...

I'm not certain that the best of 20th century prose is any less demanding... any simpler. Is James Joyce simple? Samuel Beckett? Thomas Mann? Hermann Hesse? William Faulkner? Julio Cortazar? Gabriel Garcia-Marquez? J.L. Borges? Kafka? Thomas Pynchon? John Barth?


I mean that modern prose is in general less cluttered, not that it's less intellectual. And the best poetry is not to be found in the 20th century- poetry likes archaisms and abstractness. It gains something from being old.

I like Kafka :) The content may be weird (like The Trial) but the actual writing isn't. Never heard of Barth or Cortazar so I can only take your opinion that they are 'the best of 20th century prose'.

I notice you don't include any plays here under 'literature', and this is certainly one of the most notable changes.

[Mr Endon]

I question this issue of "honesty" because it seems to go against my own experience as a visual artist...

That's fair enough. What I meant when I regurgitated that tirade on honesty was that there were writers who believed that one should be honest, and who believed that honesty in writing is feasible, or at least something worth striving for. If they were actually honest or not, well, evidently that depends of one's definition of honesty; according to their own definitions of honesty, I'd say some of them were very successful.

[Disclamer: this doesn't at all mean that I think that the 20th literature was more honest than any other century's; to infer such thing from my argument would be to engage in a sadly recurrent fallacy]


Again I'm not at all certain that 20th century literature is is any way easier to understand than earlier literature. Looking to the major poets of the century... Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, Pessoa, Rilke, Valery, Apollinaire, Pasternak, Paul Eluard, Miguel Hernandez, Eugenio Montale, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, etc... I don't see anyone of them that I find simpler to understand than Keats, Shelley, Goethe, Herrick, Wordsworth, Byron, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, etc... [...]
I'm not certain that the best of 20th century prose is any less demanding...

I agree 100%, of course. High modernism has become a byword for obscurity.

[Quark]

I mean that modern prose is in general less cluttered, not that it's less intellectual. And the best poetry is not to be found in the 20th century- poetry likes archaisms and abstractness. It gains something from being old.

If you're saying that twentieth century prose is less wordy, I could sort of agree with that. At least, I would say that it's less so than the century that preceded it. Victorian writers particularly loved the lengthy sentence, and often it was quite a commute from subject to verb. I'm thinking of Mill and Dickens and Carlyle. They really had a mania for qualification and ornamentation. Looking backward, Virginia Woolf said of their writing: "sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes." If you compare writers in the twentieth century to these people, then I think you could say that the more recent writers are less wordy. There are some notable exceptions to this--Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! would be one--but I can list quite a few concise authors.

The stuff about archaism and abstractness, though, I'm not sure about.


There was a fellow I read in a Scandinavian literature class who did naturalism better than I've ever seen it done; but his book was incredibly boring. He had no ideas, no interesting characters, no real style to speak of, just a slavish imitation of reality. It's not enough to be true. One has to be novel, or extraordinary in order to move people. Sometimes you see someone really pouring everything they've got into just the ugliest, most hackneyed creations, and the thing they are so proud of isn't the slightest bit original or profound, but it's them to a t.

I believe you are fond of quoting Oscar Wilde who said that all bad art is sincere. I don't know how we ever got to such a pass where authenticity is revered as the highest mark of genius, when few things are as diverting as a well told lie.

I think there may be a difference between earnestness and the kind of honesty that Mr. Endon brought up. I can't say I completely understand what Mr. Endon is saying, but it sounds more like artistic integrity. The writer has some idea of what they want to bring forth, and they're true to that vision throughout. What Wilde is complaining about is earnestness--particularly lyric absorption. Some writers (and even Scandanavian students, apparently) get too involved with their own feelings to say anything interesting. This may be different from the "honesty" that was brought up earlier. Of course, since that wasn't my word, I could be completely wrong.


I seem to be well and truly in the minority, I am a fan of the long 18th century

Well I'm with you, if no one else is. I was just reading Boswell's Life of Johnson actually.

[stlukesguild]

...the best poetry is not to be found in the 20th century- poetry likes archaisms and abstractness. It gains something from being old.

:confused::goof::confused: Poetry gains from being old???!

[JBI]

...the best poetry is not to be found in the 20th century- poetry likes archaisms and abstractness. It gains something from being old.

:confused::goof::confused: Poetry gains from being old???!

Yeah, sounds iffy to me - I would think that the 20th century was a particularly noteworthy one for poetry. Perhaps the 8th century in China was better, or the 10th in Japan, or whatever, but this seems a little silly. Poetry only loses with time - though some poets are able to conquer time.

But the irony of this, of course, is that if poetry gains something from being old (I don't agree, but I'll humor it), then that has no bearing on the quality of the poetry of the 20th century, as you quite simply, have not waited long enough to read it.

[Bark]

I love the 19th century. Twain, Wilde, Stowe actually. Damned ifn't that book was great. I love my country. And the 19th century showed our asses. This is the foundation of the problems to be yet worked on.

[kelby_lake]

...the best poetry is not to be found in the 20th century- poetry likes archaisms and abstractness. It gains something from being old.

:confused::goof::confused: Poetry gains from being old???!

:) Because it is of a time we no longer have- it belongs to a time we won't ever see again. The further back in time it is, the further we are from that period, thus the more mysterious. The past is poetic, legendary (no, I'm not saying everything that happened in the past is good before you start going on about war) and poor 20th century poetry- at least anything post-WW2 is going to have to wait a bit.

'There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now' (Eugene O'Neill)