Jackson Richardson
05-10-2015, 03:42 PM
I don’t understand how authors do and do not get on the Author List here. There’s a number of obscure ones included and a number of important ones excluded. And a number who are just as equally regarded as some that are not there.
For example, it includes Sophocles, but not Euripides.
Hans Christen Andersen, but not the Brothers Grimm.
Moliere but not Racine or Corneille.
Hugh Lofting (author of Dr Doolittle), but not A A Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh, a work as intriguing as Alice, I’d have thought.)
Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, but no other Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatists. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is more frequently played in the UK than anything by Marlowe nowadays and Ben Jonson used to be regarded as certainly as important.
Thomas Carlyle is there, but not John Ruskin, who is far more readable and indeed sympathetic. (That’s me. Carlyle seems a proto Facist, whereas Ruskin is a proto romantic, quixotic socialist.)
Elizabeth Barret Browning but not her husband Robert. Robert Browning may not be so much admired nowadays, but he was regarded as the equal of Tennyson.
No Andrew Marvell.
But the real oddity is the treatment of C18 English literature.
Although Dryden is included, there is nothing of Alexander Pope, a poet up with Milton and Wordsworth in terms of influence and domination of his age.
Neither of the three famous C18 male novelists, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson or Lawrence Sterne, are included.
Nothing of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose A School or Scandal is the most popular play in English stage history between Shakespeare and Wilde. (Although the list does include Oliver Goldsmith.)
So what’s the criterion for inclusion?
For example, it includes Sophocles, but not Euripides.
Hans Christen Andersen, but not the Brothers Grimm.
Moliere but not Racine or Corneille.
Hugh Lofting (author of Dr Doolittle), but not A A Milne (author of Winnie the Pooh, a work as intriguing as Alice, I’d have thought.)
Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, but no other Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatists. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is more frequently played in the UK than anything by Marlowe nowadays and Ben Jonson used to be regarded as certainly as important.
Thomas Carlyle is there, but not John Ruskin, who is far more readable and indeed sympathetic. (That’s me. Carlyle seems a proto Facist, whereas Ruskin is a proto romantic, quixotic socialist.)
Elizabeth Barret Browning but not her husband Robert. Robert Browning may not be so much admired nowadays, but he was regarded as the equal of Tennyson.
No Andrew Marvell.
But the real oddity is the treatment of C18 English literature.
Although Dryden is included, there is nothing of Alexander Pope, a poet up with Milton and Wordsworth in terms of influence and domination of his age.
Neither of the three famous C18 male novelists, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson or Lawrence Sterne, are included.
Nothing of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose A School or Scandal is the most popular play in English stage history between Shakespeare and Wilde. (Although the list does include Oliver Goldsmith.)
So what’s the criterion for inclusion?