How come no American author can rival Dickens? What is it that makes Anglo literature so soulful?
How come no American author can rival Dickens? What is it that makes Anglo literature so soulful?
How come no American author can rival Dickens? What is it that makes Anglo literature so soulful?
Rival how? What’s your metric?
I wasn't being serious this was just bait to talk about Dickens. I love Dickens' characters and wanted to know some American authors who could create characters with the same level of "soul" as Dickens.
Ragged Dick? Augie March? Studs Lonigan? Just some ideas
My hypothesis is that "Atlantis" was actually just England. Says Diodorus Siculus, according to legend, England was inhabited by Hyperborei; ancient superstition credits giants for building Stonehenge.
Take your meds
Black person how the FRICK could ancient people lift those stones. OBVIOUSLY whoever built the Great pyramid, which we couldn't recreate today, migrated North to lounge in England and build Stonehenge.
>which we couldn't recreate today
They're literally doing so right now
resurfacing take no where near as much knowhow as constructing
>was actually just England
You spelled Ireland wrong. Apologize.
I’m sure there’s plenty. Melville alone mogs him.
I like his characters and stories but not his prose. Hugo is a better novelist.
Faulkner and Mark Twain absolutely mog him
Dickens was so trite with his shallow moralism
Wilde was the only great victorian writer
> Wilde was the only great victorian writer
What about Tennyson, Hardy, Carlyle, Stevenson, Thackeray, Browning, Eliot, Brontë, Carroll?
all a bunch of fricking hacks
the victorian era was dreadful for the english novel
compare the same era in french literature, and see how much better they were
> all a bunch of fricking hacks
You haven’t read them
I don't need knowledge to have an opinion
So you’re an ignorant moron. What a surprise.
I know you are, but what am I?
takes one to know one
no it doesn’t
You probably only like Wilde because Stephen "my househusband is 50 years younger than me and I first met him before he was 18" Fry shills him.
who??
>What is it that makes Anglo literature so soulful?
You mean completely soulless? Anglos are beyond delusional and stupid. There is no soul (or culture really) in anglo society.
Furious brown hands typed this post.
Clearly a french post
French are anglos. Look it up on 'le computer'
Yep. Read Charterhouse of Parma last week. dripping with soul
Fools, all fools, the French are better authors, always have been, always will.
In order:
>France Up to and including the 19th century
>Britain Up to and including 18th Century
>Imperial Russian works
>Spain up to and including the 17th Century
>American works up to and including the Jeffersonian Era
>Imperial German works
>19th Century U.K (Better poetry than America in the century, but similar case with prose, except that it is Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Mary Shelley, Kipling and Stevenson that carry the era)
>Post-Jeffersonian 19th Century America (Melville, Hawthorne and Clemens/Twain carry this era and half of the poetry sucks donkey's balls)
>Post-Imperialist German
>Soviet Dissident
>20th Century French
>20th Century Britain (literally only Kipling is worth your time in this entire century)
>20th Century American (Only the Science Fiction is worth your time and even then, it is I Robot, Foundation, A Space Odyssey, some Bradbury and Dick works and maybe Starship Troopers that are even worth caring about)
>Soviet Non-dissident
>21st Century (too soon to tell, really, but so far, I am not a fan of what I am seeing that is being touted as a "classic")
No, I am not counting the entire history of literature and nobody cares about the vast majority of the other countries (plus I do not like Oriental Writing Styles, so I think I would be too biased in giving an opinion on such).
By the way, yes, I am fun at parties, but seriously, read French literature, I am sick of this debate across inferior nationalities.
Also, when the British try to write like the French, the result is piss poor, see Paul Clifford, as an example of this.
Is there even a point in reading a stylist like Flaubert in translation insofar as one can only read French at an eighth grade level?
Truth be told, I have not really touched Flaubert in great detail because of this, but I am looking to read him next. I am getting sick of Mann and Fitzgerald (yes, I know those are two nationalities I am reading simultaneously).
America is an anglo nation though
The best French novel is Madame Bovary, and it's a poor man's Jane Austen. She never stoops to the mawkish sentimentality Flaubert indulges in, is much funnier, and of course has that mastery of irony and voice in eg Emma which no French writer has really managed.
Case in point, I will concede that Austen is a greater writer than Bovary, but have you not overlooked the likes of, say, Voltaire? No writer since the Bronze Age was more influential. He was witty, observant and nevertheless poignant in today's world, while I do know that some members on this board will disagree with some of what he said, his nonfictional works uphold both those of classical liberalism and conservatism and his fictional works always drive the themes across subtly, something that men like Dickens seem unable to do. At least, that is my case for the French (along with Hugo, Dumas, Rousseau, Baron de Montesquieu, Musset and Verne, though I do believe that this would be far and above too long winded for a response).