Literary Panorama
Friedman, Melvin J.
Literary Panorama Literature and Western Man, by J. B. Priestley. Harper. 512 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction has used the labels "scenic" and...
...Tolstoy's War and Peace deserves the second because it is a "large and crowded" novel which ranges over a wide area...
...all owe a good deal to Joyce's Ulysses...
...Priestley admits he is not writing "a work of scholarship," nor is he trying to compile a literary history...
...Priestley has forgotten the obvious examples of Faulkner and Dos Passos: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Manhattan Transfer, and U.S.A...
...Priestley, in Anatole France's phrase, has allowed his soul to wander among masterpieces and the result is a sensitive work in literary criticism on a large scale...
...Balzac to Stendhal...
...If one were to use the same terms in speaking of literary criticism, we should probably call J. B. Priestley's approach in Literature and Western Man panoramic...
...Georg Kaiser to Bertolt Brecht...
...But these often curious judgments should not destroy our appreciation of Literature and Western Man...
...Pushkin to Byron...
...His own biases naturally appear: he seems to prefer Fielding to Richardson and Sterne...
...Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction has used the labels "scenic" and "panoramic" to speak of two different types of novels: Henry James's The Ambassadors belongs to the first category because it dramatizes consciousness and intensifies experience...
...He makes his appeal to the lay reader who is enthusiastic about literature but not professionally addicted to it...
...He crosses linguistic and geographical boundaries at will as he painstakingly reviews the literary developments since 1850— perhaps giving too much attention to certain favorites like the Victorian novelists, perhaps passing too lightly over accomplished poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins...
...Priestley's treatment of the first four hundred years—from the Gutenberg Bible to the Victorians—which covers less than half of his study, tends to be sketchy...
...one finds the old cliches and anecdotes, familiar to the literary historian, at every turn...
...He probably underrates Racine and Byron...
...Not one younger novelist of any importance derives from him...
...His accomplished belletristic style does wonders in arousing the reader's enthusiasm...
...This claim is perhaps unduly modest...
...Priestley sets as his principal criterion for choice of writers their influence on the development of Western literature...
...The test of universality as well as literary excellence is imposed before he makes up his mind about the final worth of a given author...
...But most important, Literature and Western Man manages to fill in an oblique portrait of a latter-day humanist, of J. B. Priestley himself...
...He is almost certainly wrong in insisting about Joyce: "It is simply not true that he is the great influence in modern fiction...
...This large, sprawling study attempts to trace Western literature from the Renaissance to the eve of World War II...
...In his account of the last one hundred years, however, Priestley manages many fresh insights and interesting literary analogies...
Vol. 24 • June 1960 • No. 6
