Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Depends what you want to read.
Authors like Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope were the "mass entertainment" of their day. They wrote for ordinary people as popular entertainment. Authors like Joyce and Woolf were writing as "art" and their books are a lot more work.
I'm not saying there anything wrong with "literature as art" rather than as entertainment, but you do need to be aware of it before deciding what you want to read.
|
Of course there are differences in accessibility, but they are all considered “classics”, and while other modernist writers such as Joyce and Faulkner were mentioned here, she was strangely omitted. It is of course entirely possible that the reasons for that are circumstantial, but I seem to remember that it happened on MR before, and maybe the appreciation for her writings is different here from what I’m used to (in Germany, when talking about important early 20th century writers, you will almost always hear the names Joyce and Woolf).