Can you give any instances from history or fictionto show the attitude of the French aristocracy before the Revolution?
The columns are Ionic, the decorative treatment of their capitals, and of the frieze above, being in fruits and grains, happily conventionalized.
The background in the spandrels is stained a rich orange.
The deeds of the Western sheriff have for the most part gone unchronicled, or have luridly been set forth in fiction as incidents of blood, interesting only because of their bloodiness.
The long-haired blusterer, adorned with a dialect that never was spoken, serves very well in fiction about the West, but that is not the real thing.
In the first place, he has altogether washed his hands of allegory; a species of fiction open to a thousand objections.
More recently the publication offiction has been exceptional.
From the first it reviewed poetry, fiction and drama as well as the customary classes of applied literature, and thus appealed primarily to the public rather than, like most of its predecessors, to the learned.
The taste for good literature in America is practically dead: vulgar fiction has killed the higher fiction; "sensationalism" and blatant cheap journalism have murdered the magazines; and poetry is silent.
It is because you wish me to make some profit out of my pen; and, being well informed on all business matters, you know, just as well as we literary men do, that fiction is about the only material that really pays.
But if one looks in the right places one will realize that mid-eighteenth century notions about prose fiction had a substantial background in earlier writing.
Criticism of prose fiction during that period, however, is less impressive, being neither strikingly original nor profound nor usually more than fragmentary.
The theory of prose fiction offered by the Scudérys was, on the whole, better than their practice.
Johnson's appearing to follow the defender of French fiction here is all the more interesting when one recalls his alarm in Rambler No.
Thus Mrs. Manley announced a point of view which was, at least in most respects, to dominate the theory and invigorate the practice of prose fiction throughout the century.
Indeed if it were not for Fielding himself, one might imagine from Johnson's unsteady and generally unsatisfactory criticism of prose fiction that the old neo-classical principles were completely out of date and useless.
The increasingly subjective and individualized characterization in English fiction was well supported in contemporary theory.
For in spite of the faults of Queen Zarah, the preface is one of the most substantial discussions of prose fiction in the century.
The important principle of prose fiction which Richardson and Warburton recognized--that there is power in a detailed picture of the private life of the middle class--had been suggested earlier.
Johnson's interesting and unfriendly essay on recent prosefiction (Rambler No.
When you feel in the mood for a good romance, refer to the carefully selected list of modernfiction comprising most of the successes by prominent writers of the day which is printed on the back of every Grosset & Dunlap book wrapper.
The literature of fiction was surprising in its growth, and practically limitless in its variety.
In fiction also two masters of equal power were shortly to develop a form of literature in which America has produced much of the first order.
The first noteworthy American representative of romantic or idealistic fiction which then began to appear was Marion Crawford, who has retained power and popularity for twenty-five years.
A work of fiction by Edward, Lord Lytton, published in 1853.
Charles the Bold of Burgundy will stand comparison with any in the whole range of fiction or history.
In the field of fiction there was not so much that was good.
Miscellaneous sketches, in fictionand essay, by Washington Irving, published in 1822.
Newer writers of imaginative and adventurous fiction have sprung up in Hall Caine, J.
And how about that other stupendous fictionof the harvest-moon?
The æther is at first a pure fictionconstructed to supply an unknown existence recognised as a defect.
The first process, that of making true, is the constructing of the fiction by which we complete an incomplete system, and the second is the testing of that fiction to see if it corresponds to anything actually existing.
A new novel by the author of "Marcia Schuyler" is always a treat for those of us who want clean, cheerful, uplifting fiction of the sort that you can read with pleasure, recommend with sincerity and remember with thankfulness.
I think, however, that we are not yet free to turn to our real task, but must still linger over the piece of fiction itself, and perform more preparatory work.
So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words.
When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river.
Eating the bitter bread of poverty during childhood, he contrived, by means that throw fiction into the shade, to gratify a native taste for reading, drawing, and music.
But the writer of fiction who has done the most in our day for his race, is Charles Dickens.
Since then, numerous works of fiction have flowed from her pen, which bear the same literary impress, are elevated in their moral aim, and tend to soften the heart, and make us love mankind better than before.
The monstrous fiction that they acted as one people "in their aggregate capacity" has not an atom of fact to serve as a basis.
The fiction of my having prevented the pursuit of the enemy after the victory of Manassas was exploded after it had acquired an authoritative and semi-official form in the manner and for the reasons heretofore set forth.
To such fiction was Mr. Lincoln compelled to resort to give even apparent justice to his cause.
The art of fiction is being re-born in these days.
Woman's love for man, as currently treated in fiction is largely a reflex; it is the way he wants her to feel, expects her to feel; not a fair representation of how she does feel.
Uncle Tom's Cabin appealed to the entire world, more widely than any work of fiction that was ever written; but if anybody fell in love and married in it they have been forgotten.
But what impression he does receive from fiction is a false one, and he suffers without knowing it from lack of the truer broader views of life it failed to give him.
The widening demand for broader, truer fiction is disputed by the slow racial mind: and opposed by the marketers of literature on grounds of visible self-interest, as well as lethargic conservatism.
Fiction to-day has a much wider range; yet it is still restricted, heavily and most mischievously restricted.
Literature is the most powerful and necessary of the arts, and fiction is its broadest form.
As a matter of fact the major interests of life are in line with its major processes; and these--in our stage of human development--are more varied than our fiction would have us believe.
Fiction is the most popular form in which this world-food is taken.
Is that kind offiction any sort of picture of a woman's life?
When fiction began it was the legitimate child of oral tradition; a product of natural brain activity; the legend constructed instead of remembered.
Out of this vast field of human life fiction arbitrarily selects one emotion, one process, one experience, as its necessary base.
The art of literature in this main form of fiction is far too great a thing to be wholly governed by one dominant note.
We must not be cheated by any such phantom or any other fiction of law or politics, or any monkish trick of deceit or hypocrisy.
On this judicial fiction the young man, in the name of justice, is sent to prison, punished for a mere mistake, and a mistake made in pursuance of such advice.
I stand here under indictment for having exercised my right as a citizen to vote at the last election; and by a fiction of the law, I am now in custody, and not free on this platform.
The evil of cheap fiction is partly that it will be nothing but events, that only dust will be raised, no meaning found.
The vitality of fiction is always increased by dramatic presentation.
Drama always rouses us, lyric poems depend upon their emotional quality, the informal essay has much emotional appeal, fiction of any sort stirs our feelings, and the more powerful the writing is, the more sure the appeal.
The fifteen-and twenty-cent magazine is a menace to American life in that its fiction grossly distorts the facts of life.
The fault with many worthy attempts at fiction lies not in what they are, but in what they are not.
Fiction was, indeed, often her vehicle; but it was not her end.
I, who had undertaken to teach truth, was forced to confess that fiction lay at the foundation of my scheme!
