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Day #23 of the 30 Day Book Challenge
Nov. 21st, 2020 09:32 amThis is day #23 of the 30 Day Book Challenge.
Good luck with that link by the way, it has a sneaky habit of disappearing on me.
The prompt is...well, it worked better in the 20th century, now it's kind of easy.
A Book That is Over a Hundred Years old
Basically anything written before 1920...
Seems a bit easy to me.
Here's mine...
Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady
Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire.
Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, "Clarissa" is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy. A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels. Its rich ambiguities - our sense of Clarissa's scrupulous virtue tinged with intimations of her capacity for self-deception in matters of sex; the wicked and amusing faces of Lovelace, who must be easily the most charming villain in English literature - give the story extraordinary psychological momentum.
It's notable for its narrative style - back then they wrote novels in letter format - Les Liasons Dangereux was done in a similar style, so too were a lot of Austen's novels. Even those not written in letter format - had the formality of a letter writing style.
The story, however, is ...well...it's not exactly feminist. There's a brutal rape. And the writer's intention was to punish the young woman for seeking her pleasure outside the home, and outside of her family and her duty. The writer was a minister of his time, and didn't think highly of women. And thought even less of romance.
I read it for a college English Lit Course back in the late 1980s - entitled Clarissa and Women's Literature or something like that. And I had to write a paper on it - which is why I remember it. My paper was a critique of the novel and an exploration of the narrative form, I think. The book is over 1500 pages, and huge and all letters.
They did a British Television Adaptation a while back, with a young Scean Bean playing the villianous love interest Lovelace.
Good luck with that link by the way, it has a sneaky habit of disappearing on me.
The prompt is...well, it worked better in the 20th century, now it's kind of easy.
A Book That is Over a Hundred Years old
Basically anything written before 1920...
Seems a bit easy to me.
Here's mine...
Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady
Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire.
Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, "Clarissa" is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy. A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels. Its rich ambiguities - our sense of Clarissa's scrupulous virtue tinged with intimations of her capacity for self-deception in matters of sex; the wicked and amusing faces of Lovelace, who must be easily the most charming villain in English literature - give the story extraordinary psychological momentum.
It's notable for its narrative style - back then they wrote novels in letter format - Les Liasons Dangereux was done in a similar style, so too were a lot of Austen's novels. Even those not written in letter format - had the formality of a letter writing style.
The story, however, is ...well...it's not exactly feminist. There's a brutal rape. And the writer's intention was to punish the young woman for seeking her pleasure outside the home, and outside of her family and her duty. The writer was a minister of his time, and didn't think highly of women. And thought even less of romance.
I read it for a college English Lit Course back in the late 1980s - entitled Clarissa and Women's Literature or something like that. And I had to write a paper on it - which is why I remember it. My paper was a critique of the novel and an exploration of the narrative form, I think. The book is over 1500 pages, and huge and all letters.
They did a British Television Adaptation a while back, with a young Scean Bean playing the villianous love interest Lovelace.
