The Secret Library – Page 44 – Interesting Literature

George Egerton: The Half-Forgotten Modernist Pioneer

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the pioneering and half-forgotten writer of the modernist short story

A bridegroom waits in the hall, while his bride sobs upstairs in her mother’s arms. Married off to an older man against her wishes, the seventeen-year-old Flo leaves home to take up married life with Philip, her husband. Five years later, she makes the journey she has been putting off ever since she got married: she returns home by train and tells her mother that she leads a miserable life married to the repulsive adulterer Philip, who has recently taken off to Paris with a girl from the Alhambra.

On the Science of Bibliosmia: That Enticing Book Smell

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the strange pull of bibliosmia by getting his nose literally into a book

‘There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.’ So Ray Bradbury, author of the nightmare dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 about a world where books are burned, dismissed the long-term future of electronic books.

Dante Among the Machines: Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Land of Darkness’

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers a curious dystopian story by Queen Victoria’s favourite novelist

The terms ‘dystopian’ and ‘ecology’ both gained currency in the mid-nineteenth century, although ‘dystopia’ has been traced back even earlier. The Victorian era witnessed the emergence of a new genre of science fiction, dystopian literature, which would produce several classic novels of the twentieth century. Victorian writers used this new genre to fashion responses to the dramatic social and technological changes they were living through, chiefly the discovery of Darwinian evolution and the rise of industrialisation in the period.

The changing landscape of Victorian Britain played an important part in how authors of early dystopian works addressed questions about what we now call ‘the environment’: in both Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), the crowded smoggy metropolis of contemporary London was refigured in some future age as a wild garden, following some dramatic alteration in the world’s climate.

Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Antwerp’: The First Great Modernist Poem of WWI

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores a modernist war poem by an overlooked writer

As it’s Refugee Week, my thoughts have turned to poetry about refugees – such as Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’ and the lines from the Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More (which may have been penned by Shakespeare) about the plight of refugees in Tudor London. Modernist poetry, too, treated the plight of refugees during and after the First World War, and one of the first poets to do so was Ford Madox Ford, better known now as a novelist.

The Original Great Gatsby: Petronius’ Satyricon

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the ancient Roman novel that inspired James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Today is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s vast modernist masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), is set in Dublin on a single day, 16 June 1904. Since at least the 1950s, devotees of Joyce’s novel have marked the 16th of June each year by reading the book, getting drunk on Guinness, or – in the case of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – getting married on that day. I’d like to mark Bloomsday by paying homage to ancient Rome’s equivalent to Joyce’s 1920s novel, and an underappreciated work of classical literature that almost certainly influenced him.

Three of the most important works of western literature from the 1920s, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, all tip a wink to a remarkable work of literature from classical Rome that has survived only as fragments. Depending on your view, it’s either one of the first novels ever written, or a scandalous piece of trashy pornography. Its title – Satyricon, meaning ‘satyr-like adventures’ – provides a clue to the bawdiness on offer.