Artistic license : three centuries of good writing and bad behavior / Brooke Allen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allen, Brooke.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authors, English--Anecdotes.

Authors, English.

Authors, American.

Authors, American--Anecdotes.

Conduct of life--Anecdotes.

Conduct of life.

Authorship--Anecdotes.

Authorship.

Genre:

Anecdotes.

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xi, 244 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : Ivan R. Dee, 2004.

Summary:

Brooke Allen's sparkling new collection of essays considers the dysfunctional and apparently destructive nature of great talent. Ms. Allen shows how the incendiaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, in real terms, far more daring and more disturbing to the moral and ideological systems of their time than is the modern mutineer, who stages his rebellion within a social framework that condones--or at least pretends to condone--rebellion. She finds it surprising that so many writers held on to artistic rectitude in the face of all-but-insuperable personal failings.

Contents:

Pepys's Indecent Familiarity 3

The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne 20

Boswell: A Quivering Jelly 36

The Scholar of Scandal 49

The Self-renewing Jane Austen 65

Hans Christian Andersen: A Fight for Love and Glory 80

The Byronic Melodrama 87

Hawthorne's Twilit Soul 98

The Tragic Life and Comic Art of William Makepeace Thackeray 105

Wilkie Collins: An Enlightened Libertine 125

Henty's Christian Gentlemen 143

Bram Stoker and Modern Myths 153

No Ladies' Man 171

The Wizard Behind the Curtain 177

With the Murphys: What a Swell Party It Was 184

Main Street's Scourge 191

William Saroyan's Unchained Ego 210

The Dishonorable Schoolboy 219.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

1566635950

OCLC:

54767344