Parthian Words
, by Jameson, StormNote: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
- ISBN: 9781448200412 | 1448200415
- Cover: Paperback
- Copyright: 8/14/2013
This short book offers the dispassionate but sharp-tonguedcomments on the novel, by an old fiction hand, a personal exercise of taste andjudgment, backed by a life interest in the history and methods of literarycriticism. It reviews the evergreen question of the death of the novel,so often and confidently announced; the difficulties, peculiar to ournihilistic and often brutal age, that press on the contemporary novelist; theeffect on him and his work of the technological revolution; his increasingdiffidence in face of the overwhelming prestige of science in our day; thechanging language of fiction; the novel as an art form; the nouveau roman, andits most sophisticated and more esoteric cousin, the nouvelle critique; theeruption into common daylight of pornographic fiction; the use and misuse ofcensorship. It attempts to decide whether the traditional or classic novel hasa future and what sort of future. Though it may offend a great many solemnpersons it has not been written to give offence, but in a serious effort toreach some positive conclusions about the health, the moral and aestheticworth, of the novel in a day when our minds are, as never before, at the mercyof their worst dreams.