the-venereal-bede:

femmenietzsche:

welkinalauda:

femmenietzsche:

anaisnein:

skeletontemple:

sinesalvatorem:

femmenietzsche:

Among Scott’s most famous works was “Ivanhoe,” published in 1820. The romance, set in the 12th century, presents a tale of intrigue, love and valor. The plot traces the fortunes of young Wilfred of Ivanhoe as he strives, despite his father’s opposition, to gain the hand of the beautiful Lady Rowena. In the course of Ivanhoe’s adventures, Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood appear, and Ivanhoe performs many a remarkable feat. He travels to Palestine, gains fame in the Crusades, returns home in disguise, bravely distinguishes himself in a two-day jousting tournament, and last but surely not least, single-handedly rescues a raven-haired Jewess named Rebecca, who has been abducted and is in grave peril. 

In the first half of the 19th century, America caught a highly infectious case of what Mark Twain would later diagnose as “the Sir Walter disease.” Northerners and Southerners alike were smitten. The more far-fetched the plot and remote the setting of Scott’s works, the more pleased his American readers seemed to be. In less than a decade, from 1814-1823, more than half a million volumes of Scott’s novels and poems were sold in the United States, and even after Scott’s death in 1832, his books remained extremely popular. 

If anything, Scott’s romances were even more popular on the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line. Some southern families even went so far as to name their estates and children after places and characters in Scott’s stories.  As Mark Twain would later write, “Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.”

The lofty language, lofty sentiments and lofty deeds popularized by Scott imbued nearly all Southern wartime poetry with the fragrant smell of romanticism. And poetry enjoyed a degree of near-universal popularity during the Civil War years that is hard for modern readers to imagine. Newspapers and magazines throughout the Confederacy published an abundance of war poems written by both amateur and accomplished poets. Indeed, Southerners bombarded newspapers with such a quantity of unsolicited poetry on war-related topics that one publication apparently threatened to charge aspiring poets the same rate to print their verses as it charged to print obituaries.

Between this and Pilgrim’s Progress, I’d be very interested in reading a whole book on the literary fads of the past that were seen as civilizationally fundamental but have since faded into total obscurity. (I guess people still read Ivanhoe, but whatever.)

I’d also like to read this. Does anyone know of other books or authors which were cultural giants in a certain era/location that people don’t pay much attention to anymore? I’d especially like to read essays talking about what effects they had.

Off the top of my head Horatio Alger books were huge in the late 1800s, back when people like Rockefeller and Carnegie were seen as embodying the American dream (viewed as lone giants who became wildly successful because they put in the effort and chased their dreams). These days I only hear about Horatio Alger when people want to criticize the bootstrap myth. François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil was an extremely popular 18th century author of YA and children’s books. He was very well known, at one point; his books were reprinted several times. I literally only know who he is because Victor Hugo mentioned his name in Les Mis while taking some time to bash the trashy romances that had become popular in Paris and I had the good luck to remember enough of this to find the passage again. @scribefindegil You know things about medieval literature, yes? I can only think of King Arthur, I have no idea what currently-obscure stuff was popular back then.

Only medieval-specific courses for grads and unusually nerdy majors read Piers Ploughman now. That was foundational. And John Skelton doesn’t even make syllabi nowadays.

Oh and later on: Pilgrim’s Progress! Used to be where an aspirational home would have copies of that, the Bible, and Shakespeare.

To put things all in one thread, here’s the addition from earlgraytay:

Off the top of my head:

John Ruskin (Architecture critic, novelist, poet, HUGELY influential among the Victorians but then everyone stopped giving a damn)

Tobias Smollett (One of the fathers of the modern novel; a lot of Victorian writers were heavily influenced by his stuff but for some reason people stopped reading him and I don’t know why, he’s fantastic.)

Thomas Gray (I actually don’t quite know why he’s so influential; he wrote a very famous poem called “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, but that’s about it).

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.

Oh yeah, I’ve heard about that one. I’d also nominate Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. That had a brief but important moment in the sun, IIRC. Not as big as some of the other works mentioned.

From the twelfth century, I have to mention Walter de Châtillon’s Alexandreis (epic on Alexander the Great’s life). It was massively popular (over 200 extant manuscripts between its late 1100s composition and the 1500s or so, which is a MAJOR deal); I also recall that some teachers complained about students who constantly shirked their curriculum to read it. It was a total blockbuster in Latin Europe, but p much unheard of today.

I don’t have links on me, but the Townsend translation (1996 i believe) is gestural but solid, and it includes some fun stuff in the introduction, like a scintillating 13th century author bio that alleges Walter composed the Alexandreis to win over the affections of his archbishop William, as part of a torrid gay love triangle that involved another clerk and (not as a participant, sadly) the pope

(im so glad ruskins in here btw. he inspired at least one late-1800s socialist artistic commune in Tennessee!)