Pic spam link and mini rant

[selenak]

kathyh put up a lovely Bamberg pic spam, which those of you I managed to interest in my lovely hometown might want to check out:

Beautiful Bamberg here!

Also, it appears this year I actually managed to read a Booker winner before it won - Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. (Reviewed in these ramblings some weeks back, dear reader.) And lo and behold, there is snobbery in the press reaction, to wit, this article, which complaints that "novelists should be engaging with the issues of the day – like Balzac, Dickens and George Eliot did – not indulging in high-class escapism. Does anyone actually read Sir Walter Scott any more?"

Excuse me while I roll my eyes. (And admit to a certain bias, but still.) Firstly, you know what, Dickens and George Eliot wrote historical novels, too. (A Tale of Two Cities and Romola. Maybe not their best novels, respectively, but they undeniably wrote them.) Secondly, Walter Scott may not have that many readers, but you know who still does and still gets imitated to this day? Alexandre Dumas, that's who. Thirdly, don't make me brush up my George Lukács. If one of the most brilliant Marxist critics of his day was able to see how historical novels can always contain fascinating social commentary not just about the period they're set in but the period they're written in (see also: The Historical Novel from 1937, which is inflicted on every literature student over here, so it bloody better be inflicted on Anglosaxon students as well), so can you. Fourthly, how anyone can define a depiction of Henry Tudor's England in its back-stabbing, paranoid, religious strife torn darkness which starts with the depiction if a child getting beaten within an inch of his life in graphic detail as "escapism" is beyond me, but hey, that journalist proudly states he doesn't have the time to read historical fiction anyway.

The irony is that Wolf Hall, while brilliant, did cause me some problems, and I like Mantel's A place of greater safety better as far as her historical fiction is concerned. But right now I'm all ready to wave banners saying "Long live the historical novel". Bah, humbug.

Comments

[wychwood]

It's the same stupid accusations you find with SFF - although I hadn't realised that historicals got targeted that way, I thought they were supposed to be SRS FIKSHUN.

I read Walter Scott! And both more copiously and with greater enjoyment than Dickens or Eliot. Is he really that unpopular? He was published in the Penguin £1 Classics series, back in the day. I should try him again, actually - I remember liking Ivanhoe.

[selenak]

I don't know about England, but historicals get targeted that way in Germany at the very least since the 70s, though individual lit critics come to their defense.

Walter Scott: I'm going by mention of reading him in lj and in newspapers, so I might be wrong, but I think he's not as widely read as Dickens or Eliot, yes. Anyway, go you!

[wychwood]

It's probably true over here as well. But there's certainly been some major successful historicals in the last decade or so - Wolf Hall isn't surprising, in that sense - where the only similar SFF-ish books haven't actually been all that SFF-ish. Time Traveller's Wife and The Road and the like.

You're probably right about Scott, too. He's definitely not the name that Dickens is. I don't know how he'd compare with Eliot in terms of readers, though - Eliot is Litritchur, whereas Scott is a little less classy, so possibly more popular? He's had a lot more films, at the very least! He's a name that I would expect people to know, either way.