Oddly enough I just bought that Walter Kaufman translation of Faust (with the German on the opposite page-which is nice, I don't read German well enough to fully get it but it's good to have to know how it sounds) last weekend. I'm interested for Austen next week-sorta like that painting of German lineages I'm always wanting to shove novelists into "Great Tradition" or "Romantic" and Austen is probably the platonic archetype of the former! Clever of you to follow Byron with her in that way. He's probably the romantic I know the least-his biography is about what I knew going into this, even Wordsworth I had more of a sense of, even if that was mostly Longfellow being partly named for him and Trilling's (unusually for him) close reading of the Immortality Ode.
Yes, I'll probably expend some energy trying to excavate the "Romantic Austen," because if you don't you're left with a moral rhetoric that is the cover for a not wholly ignoble but also not universally relevant social agenda. I think all the Great Tradition writers are secretly Romantics at heart—or not so secret, in the case of Lawrence. But I essentially side with the Euros in this one case and think it was mistake on the part of Anglos to come up with something called the "novel" as distinct from the "romance."
Yeah, I agree. The American novel especially is really a romance in most its forms. We’re a transient people as I think Paglia says, and our literature is consequently unreal even when it imagines otherwise.
Oddly enough I just bought that Walter Kaufman translation of Faust (with the German on the opposite page-which is nice, I don't read German well enough to fully get it but it's good to have to know how it sounds) last weekend. I'm interested for Austen next week-sorta like that painting of German lineages I'm always wanting to shove novelists into "Great Tradition" or "Romantic" and Austen is probably the platonic archetype of the former! Clever of you to follow Byron with her in that way. He's probably the romantic I know the least-his biography is about what I knew going into this, even Wordsworth I had more of a sense of, even if that was mostly Longfellow being partly named for him and Trilling's (unusually for him) close reading of the Immortality Ode.
Yes, I'll probably expend some energy trying to excavate the "Romantic Austen," because if you don't you're left with a moral rhetoric that is the cover for a not wholly ignoble but also not universally relevant social agenda. I think all the Great Tradition writers are secretly Romantics at heart—or not so secret, in the case of Lawrence. But I essentially side with the Euros in this one case and think it was mistake on the part of Anglos to come up with something called the "novel" as distinct from the "romance."
Yeah, I agree. The American novel especially is really a romance in most its forms. We’re a transient people as I think Paglia says, and our literature is consequently unreal even when it imagines otherwise.