Fashions in Literature

Warner, Charles Dudley, 1829-1900Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
40K words
Chapters
5

Tags

English Originals Literary Appreciation Literary GiantsSocial CritiqueIntellectual CommentaryLiterary CriticismPopular ExplanationEssays and NotesTraditional AestheticsCultural ChangeSocial ObservationChanging Trends

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Fashions in Literature by Charles Dudley WarnerAuthor: Warner, Charles Dudley, 1829-1900,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Dec 5, 2004

Editor's review

This book is a collection of essays by Charles Dudley Warner on literary fashion, discussing how literary taste shifts with the times. Warner was a nineteenth-century American essayist and critic with a relaxed, ironic style, skilled at moving from everyday observation into larger cultural questions. The essays center on trendiness, imitation, and innovation in literature, addressing both readers' tastes and the situation of writers, and can be seen as a small mirror of nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary fashion. Its value lies not in systematic theory but in an essayistic critical perspective: it places literary phenomena back within social taste and the conditions of circulation. For today's readers, these discussions still prompt reflection on the relationship between the popular and the classic, between following the crowd and original creation. Read it as essays rather than a treatise, appreciating the tone and angle of observation without demanding systematic conclusions. The public-domain electronic edition suits fragmented reading, as each piece stands alone.

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Reading tips

  1. Read each essay independently, one or two at a time, without pressing for continuous progress
  2. Note observations that resonate with today's popular culture as you read
  3. Read alongside contemporary literary criticism to compare different critical tastes

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5

FAQ

Which period's literary fashion does this book discuss? Warner lived in the nineteenth century, and the book discusses Anglo-American literary taste and fashion in and around his own era, not contemporary literary phenomena. Readers should understand it in the context of nineteenth-century literary criticism.
Do the views in the book still have value today? It offers no systematic theory, but its observations on imitation and originality, the popular and the classic, are suggestive across eras. Today's readers can use it as a reference perspective for thinking about changes in literary taste, not as conclusions to apply directly.
Do I need to read other books first to understand it? No. The essays are relatively independent and written in an essayistic style with a low barrier to entry. If you are unfamiliar with the background of American literary history, you can look up the relevant authors and works as you read for smoother understanding.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Warner, Charles Dudley, 1829-1900 Author

Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) was an American writer and editor, with fifty-seven of his works held in this catalog. His subjects are notably wide-ranging: there are familiar essays on gardening and everyday leisure such as My Summer in a Garden, a study of a fellow writer in Washington Irving, and travel accounts of foreign places, including In the Levant, My Winter on the Nile and Our Italy, the last concerning Italy. The chapters associated with The Gilded Age indicate that he also took part in writing on social themes. The catalog classifies him under inspirational growth, suggesting that some of his works carry a tone of counsel and self-reflection. Public information is limited, so rather than dwelling on biographical detail, readers may begin with his essays and travel writings and appreciate their easy, unhurried style and close observation.