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评论 (5)
出版社周刊评论
Bradbury, an English novelist who seems to have spent a lifetime studying and enjoying what he calls trans-Atlantic fiction, shows how, from almost the very beginning of American literature, British and American novelists have influenced each other's work more than they might care to admit. And the influence has come not from aping style but from the myths traded back and forth about each other. Washington Irving, for example, spent much of his writing career abroad and, in his Sketch Book, created not only Rip Van Winkle but also cozy essays that established the American view of Merrie Olde England that exists even today. Dickens crossed the Atlantic in search of Utopia, and the reality he found, Bradbury says, made him a better writer. Among the other Americans Bradbury covers in detail are Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and James Baldwin. The Europeans include Trollope, Thackeray, Kipling, Waugh, Lawrence and such non-Brits as Chateaubriand and Nabokov. Also included are some autobiographical memories of Bradbury's own post-WWII adventures at the University of Indiana. The scholarship and critical observations throughout are impressive, but Bradbury's engaging personality is what makes the book a special pleasure. This is literary history at its best. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
In another of his able (if not overly inspired) surveys, Bradbury (The Modern American Novel, 1983, etc.) traces the ``flourishing traffic in fancy, fiction, dream, and myth'' between the old world and the new. Ranging from Washington Irving and Charles Dickens to Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis, Bradbury attempts to reveal, as reflected in European (primarily British) and American fiction, ``the barter of myths and illusions,'' the ways in which writers on opposite sides of the Atlantic have imagined (and influenced) each other's societies. He points out that the fantasies that each have nursed of the other have often had a profound impact and have sometimes led to disillusion. The protagonist of Herman Melville's novel Redburn goes to England and discovers that the idyllic travel guides he's read have little to do with reality. Such works, Melville writes, ``are the least reliable books in all literature; and nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide- books.'' Bradbury considers Chateaubriand's Indian romance Atala, Washington Irving's History of New York and Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and the works of Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Mark Twain, among others, as he plots the ways in which ideas of American ``innocence'' and European ``civilization'' have clashed, flourished, and intermingled. Toward the end he flags a bit, giving perfunctory summaries of the Lost Generation and Modernism, but the narrative revives in his discussion of the the perennially new America imagined by the French critics Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. Bradbury suspects that, despite the emergence of a new ``Euro-identity,'' and despite America's growing interest in the Pacific Rim, the great fictions that Europe and America share, and which are ``part of our essential record of human understanding,'' will retain their power. Bradbury necessarily skimps here and there, but he digests, summarizes, and critiques enough to make this into a readable, useful, original guide.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Since the days when Captain John Smith returned to London to publish his tales of the wilds of Virginia and the charms of Pocahontas, writers have been plying the Atlantic seaways in search of audiences and material. Himself a perceptive traveler and novelist, Bradbury invites us to sail with him as he retraces the journeys of Washington Irving, heading for the grandeurs of medieval Spain; of Dickens, making the lecture circuit through the mill towns of New England; of Twain, deadpanning his way through Italy; of Wilde, playing the dandy for Colorado miners; of Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, inventing modernism in the cafes of Paris; and of Waugh, marveling at the tastelessness of California cemeteries. But behind the international personalities loom the continental myths: America, land of utopian possibilities; Europe, repository of cultural elegance. What Bradbury does best is to steer us through the ironies, paradoxes, and deceits that his transatlantic personalities have negotiated in wending their way between the myths. A great many readers will want to book passage with this literary helmsman, for he charts a course of imaginative exploration well clear of the rocks of pedantry and jargon. --Bryce Christensen
Choice 评论
As he confesses late in his text, Bradbury began this book on his first transatlantic journey in the 1950s. His desire to present a coherent narrative of the intercontinental voyages, both personal and literary, between the New World and the Old (particularly England and France) partakes of the high modernist commitment to a Western white male canon and the debates surrounding nationalism, individualism, and decadence. Unlike his more traditional From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (CH, Oct'92), this volume is a good read--offering a sweeping, compelling vision and a central thesis worthy of exploration: "[The fictionality of America, the fictionality of Europe] was always a double romance ... and it became nothing less than a myth...." Pitched to a more popular audience than William Spengemann's A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the Idea of American Literature (CH, Oct'89), Bradbury's text shares the project of those who eschew the idea of American exceptionalism. He traces the maturation of new types of worlds in part made possible by the existence of America as both idea and fact. His commitment to a creative imagination with the power to critique, construct, and re-envision is refreshing. All collections. S. Danielson Portland State University
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Bradbury (American studies, Univ. of East Anglia), the author of numerous works of criticism (e.g., The Modern British Novel, Viking, 1995) examines here the myths Europeans created about America and those Americans created about Europe. Beginning with James Fenimore Cooper and René de Chateaubriand, Bradbury examines the fiction of, among many others, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Evelyn Waugh, and Vladimir Nabokov to show what these myths were, how they changed, and how they affected the form of the novel itself. Some readers may object to another study of white malesonly the women Frances Trollope and Gertrude Stein are discussed and African Americans Richard Wright and James Baldwin mentioned brieflybut this American-European symbiosis is significant, and Bradbury does not claim it is all of American culture. His well-written and -researched study seems directed primarily to an academic audience.Judy Mimken, Boise P.L., Id. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.