\n\n"}\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOff 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.\n\nFran\u00e7ois Guillaume Ducray-Duminil was an extremely popular 18th century author of YA and children\u2019s 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.\n\n@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.\n\nAmong Scott\u2019s most \nfamous works was \u201cIvanhoe,\u201d published in 1820. The romance, set in the \n12th century, presents a tale of intrigue, love and valor. The plot \ntraces the fortunes of young Wilfred of Ivanhoe as he strives, despite \nhis father\u2019s opposition, to gain the hand of the beautiful Lady Rowena. \nIn the course of Ivanhoe\u2019s adventures, Richard the Lionheart and Robin \nHood appear, and Ivanhoe performs many a remarkable feat. He travels to \nPalestine, gains fame in the Crusades, returns home in disguise, bravely\n distinguishes himself in a two-day jousting tournament, and last but \nsurely not least, single-handedly rescues a raven-haired Jewess named \nRebecca, who has been abducted and is in grave peril.\u00a0\n\nIn the first half of the 19th century, America caught a highly \ninfectious case of what Mark Twain would later diagnose as \u201cthe Sir \nWalter disease.\u201d Northerners and Southerners alike were smitten. The \nmore far-fetched the plot and remote the setting of Scott\u2019s works, the \nmore pleased his American readers seemed to be. In less than a decade, \nfrom 1814-1823, more than half a million volumes of Scott\u2019s novels and \npoems were sold in the United States, and even after Scott\u2019s death in \n1832, his books remained extremely popular.\u00a0
\n\nIf anything, Scott\u2019s \nromances were even more popular on the other side of the Mason-Dixon \nLine. Some southern families even went so far as to name their estates \nand children after places and characters in Scott\u2019s stories. \u00a0As Mark \nTwain would later write, \u201cSir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making\n Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great \nmeasure responsible for the war.\u201d
\nThe lofty language, \nlofty sentiments and lofty deeds popularized by Scott imbued nearly all \nSouthern wartime poetry with the fragrant smell of romanticism. And \npoetry enjoyed a degree of near-universal popularity during the Civil \nWar years that is hard for modern readers to imagine. Newspapers and \nmagazines throughout the Confederacy published an abundance of war poems\n written by both amateur and accomplished poets. Indeed, Southerners \nbombarded newspapers with such a quantity of unsolicited poetry on \nwar-related topics that one publication apparently threatened to charge \naspiring poets the same rate to print their verses as it charged to \nprint obituaries.
Between this and Pilgrim\u2019s Progress, I\u2019d 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.)
\nI\u2019d 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\u2019t pay much attention to anymore? I\u2019d especially like to read essays talking about what effects they had.
\nOnly medieval-specific courses for grads and unusually nerdy majors read Piers Ploughman now. That was foundational. And John Skelton doesn\u2019t even make syllabi nowadays.
\n\nOh and later on: Pilgrim\u2019s Progress! Used to be where an aspirational home would have copies of that, the Bible, and Shakespeare.
\nTo put things all in one thread, here\u2019s the addition from earlgraytay:
\n\n\nOff the top of my head:
\nJohn Ruskin (Architecture critic, novelist, poet, HUGELY influential among the Victorians but then everyone stopped giving a damn)
\nTobias Smollett (One\n of the fathers of the modern novel; a lot of Victorian writers were \nheavily influenced by his stuff but for some reason people stopped \nreading him and I don\u2019t know why, he\u2019s fantastic.)
\nThomas Gray (I actually don\u2019t quite know why he\u2019s so influential; he wrote a very famous poem called \u201cElegy Written in a Country Churchyard\u201d, but that\u2019s about it).
\nEdward Bellamy\u2019s Looking Backward.
\nOh yeah, I\u2019ve heard about that one. I\u2019d also nominate Oswald Spengler\u2019s 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.
\nFrom the twelfth century, I have to mention Walter de Ch\u00e2tillon\u2019s Alexandreis (epic on Alexander the Great\u2019s 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.
\nI don\u2019t 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
\n(im so glad ruskins in here btw. he inspired at least one late-1800s socialist artistic commune in Tennessee!)
\n