As a useful antidote to obsessions with Author-X’s mooted Influence on Author-Y, I’ve been reading (audio-book hearing) Faulks on Fiction — Great British Characters and the Secret Life of the Novel. This is novelist Sebastian Faulk’s reaction to his personal ups’n’downs via Lit Theory’s spins on author-as-human-like-us vs product-as-self-contained-text. In particular, Faulks welcomes VN’s dislike of hunting for real-life ‘biographical’ influences in the novelist’s choice of characters/actions. Faulks’s message is, Lord, deliver us from total critical-method immersion! Stay afloat and enjoy the stories and characters as precious inventions.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 03/10/2011 02:47, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels -Richard Locke
September, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-231-15782-7
"Using the portrayal of childhood as his eye-opening theme and total immersion as his critical method, Richard Locke brilliantly reexamines classic novels we complacently thought we understood. He enlarges and freshens our insight into modern works by Salinger, Nabokov, and Philip Roth by placing them in a line that reaches back to masterpieces by Dickens and Twain..."˜ Morris Dickstein
"Richard Locke succeeds in giving a fresh mythic quality to the prismlike insights of Dickens, Twain, James, Barrie, Salinger, Nabokov, and Roth (with a nod to the other Roth, Henry). . . .
Critical Children <http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15782-7/critical-children/reviews>
cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231.../reviews -
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Google sources a lot more about Nabokov in R. Locke: For instance:
DETAILS IN NABOKOV, BARTHELME, AND PROUST
RICHARD LOCKE - Article first published online: 11 SEP 2007 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9736.2007.00332.xIssueThe Yale Review
Volume 95, Issue 4, pages 45ˆ57, October 2007