Thanks for the Lounsberry material Bookworm girl. It provides a good basis for literary non-fiction and academic works.
Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Oz got around the need for absolute fidelity to the facts by calling his memoir an "autobiographical novel" and with PLF, there's the issue of selective or faulty memory (a factor in any memoir, of course), compounded by that lost journal. Both are entirely mesmerizing and for my purposes, certainly true enough. Even third-person history requires interpretation.
For a history book the club read that I think meets the literary bar, I'd suggest John Hemming's The Conquest of the Incas.
|
I would agree that Hemming represents what literary academic non-fiction should be like. Another example I would add is Christopher Clark's
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War in 1914. The literary element of academic work is important but not always appreciated.
The Harvard Classics includes many examples including Darwin's work.
The Golden Bough by Frazer is surely a literary work of the highest calibre, as this short passage demonstrates:
"Thus a religious theory was blended with a magical practice. The combination is familiar in history. Indeed, few religions have ever succeeded in wholly extricating themselves from the old trammel of magic. The inconsistency of acting on two opposite principles, however it may vex the soul of the philosopher, rarely troubles the common man; indeed he is seldom even aware of it. His affair is to act, not to analyse the motives of his action. If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime."
Misanthropic that may be--but it is beautifully so expressed.