Hynes (The Edwardian Turn of Mind, 1968) has here gathered his more incidental writings on the intellectual vagaries of that cultural interregnum which began in 1900 with the death of Queen Victoria and ended abruptly in August, 1914. It is Professor Hynes' special talent to perceive the unsuspected affinities between the literary adversaries of the age — Shaw and Wells, Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf, Chesterton and Ford, Belloc, Wells, Conrad, T.E. Hulme and even that last grim disciple of Victorian science and materialism, Mrs. Beatrice Webb. Each in his own way recognized the epoch as a hiatus — social, moral, and aesthetic. The stolid virtues of the 19th century no longer gave comfort. Poverty, Socialism and Feminism shook the society. In the words of Virginia Woolf, the artists themselves knew they were "between styles." But the literary manifestations of their plight proved remarkable. Above all, there was the acute sense of temporality, the "meticulous care for the historical moment" which suffused Wells and Ford and Forster, all of whom "carried the advanced ideas of the late-Victorian reformers into the twentieth century, and watched them grow out-of-date and useless there." Nostalgia was the inevitable accompaniment of this "sense of the pastness of the past" but so too was anxiety and writers as different as Conrad and Chesterton shared a vision of impending disorder and dissolution — a hypersensitivity to the fragility of inherited civilization. Hynes' view of la belle epoque is thus more somber than most — and perhaps he does not give due regard to the self-conscious posturing and the sporting frivolity of, say, a Saki. Taken individually the brief essays gathered here seem impressionistic and, in the case of minor writers, even parenthetical. But collectively they impart precisely that sense of fleeting discontinuity which Hynes claims for the age.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1972
ISBN: 0710074417
Page Count: 232
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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