[Vwoolf] "Mrs. Amyot's last brilliant lecture on the influence of something upon somebody"
Jean Mallinson
annaj at telus.net
Sun Jul 15 12:07:02 EDT 2012
This is priceless! The two examples are brilliant and very funny. It
makes me want to read Edith Wharton again.
Jean Mallinson
On 7/15/2012 4:53 AM, Stuart N. Clarke wrote:
> From Edith Wharton's "The Pelican" (1898):
> 'Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the "influence"
> of one author on another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and
> had done very well as long as the public was satisfied with the
> tracing of such obvious influences as that of Turner on Ruskin, of
> Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on the English drama; but such
> investigations had soon lost all charm for her too-sophisticated
> audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the
> influenced should be absolutely unknown, or that there should be no
> perceptible connection between the two. The zest of the performance
> lay in the measure of ingenuity with which the lecturer established a
> relation between two people who had probably never heard of each
> other, much less read each other's works. A pretty Miss Williams with
> red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great success on the
> influence of the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while somebody
> else had given a "course" on the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas upon
> Professor Huxley."
> Stuart
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Vwoolf mailing list
> Vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
> https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20120715/8e11dac8/attachment.html>
More information about the Vwoolf
mailing list