#literary

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read. ↗

— Lascelles Abercrombie

#epics #first #intended #literary #meant

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#career #created #felt #fled #having

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#books #imagination #literary #lover #object

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two. ↗

— Will Eisner

#always #art #art form #been #belief

The most celebrated American author of the twentieth century, Bellow objected during the first part of his career to being designated a “Jewish writer, ” but it was he who demonstrated how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America. With Bellow, Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to become a new form of American regionalism. Yet he did not have to write about Jews in order to write as a Jew. Bellow's curious mingling of laughter and trembling is particularly manifest in his novel Henderson the Rain King, that follows an archetypal Protestant American into mythic Africa. Bellow not only influenced and paved the way for other American Jewish writers like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick, but naturalized the immigrant voice: the American novel came to seem freshly authentic when it spoke in the voice of one of its discernible minorities. ↗

— Hana Wirth-Nesher

#design

Hardy’s astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among other genres he employs the lyric, narrative, ballads, and the sonnet. He also moves easily between the amplitude of dramatic monologue and the compression of imagism. He experiments continually with an ingenious variety of stanza forms and rhyme schemes, rejecting the fluidity of contemporary poetry for his own idiosyncratic style, based on a real understanding of the variety of speech rhythms and registers. Each individual poem is designed to express in its language and form, and with utter honesty, Hardy’s impressions of life. ↗

— Geoffrey Harvey

#design

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#humour #literary-criticism #writing #education

A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#education #literary-theory #reading #education

It is the voice of everyday people, rather than of a self-conscious 'artist', that we hear in Caedmon's Hymn, and in such texts as Deor's Lament (also known simply as Deor) or The Seafarer. These reflect ordinary human experience and are told in the first person. They make the reader or hearer relate directly with the narratorial 'I', and frequently contain intertextual references to religious texts. Although they express a faith in God, only Caedmon's Hymn is an overtly religious piece. Already we can notice one or two conventions creeping in; ways of writing which will be found again and again in later works. One of these is the use of the first-person speaker who narrates his experience, inviting the reader or listener to identify with him and sympathise with his feelings. ↗

— Ronald Carter

#experience

I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv. ↗

— Jess C. Scott

#anti-twilight #dark-humor #drugs #gluttony #heroin