Elegant Jeremiahs (Routledge Revivals): The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer Contributor(s): Landow, George P. (Author) |
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ISBN: 1138854921 ISBN-13: 9781138854925 Publisher: Routledge OUR PRICE: $49.39 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 2016 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Language Arts & Disciplines | Journalism - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh |
Dewey: 828 |
Physical Information: 202 pages |
Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Labelled an elegant Jeremiah by a journalist of his day, the urbane Victorian Matthew Arnold must have received the comparison with the Old Testament prophet uneasily. Writing in the 1970s, Norman Mailer seems to owe nothing to the biblical for his description of a long hot wait to buy a cold drink while reporting on the first voyage to the moon. Yet both Arnold and Mailer, George P. Landow asserts in this book, are sages, writers in the nonfiction prose form of secular prophecy, a genre richly influenced by the episodic structures and harshly critical attitudes toward society which characterize Old Testament prophetic literature. In this book, first published in 1986, Landow defines the genre by exploring its rhetoric, an approach that enables him to illuminate the relationships among representative works of the nineteenth century to one another, to biblical, oratorical, and homiletic traditions, and to such twentieth-century writers as Lawrence, Didion, and Mailer. |