What English-language "literature" is now being published?

[pecksniff]

That is, what authors are now writing, whose books someday will be studied in English classes?

 

[Sean]

Anything that's won the Booker for the last decade or so for a start.

 

[oggbashan]

That is, what authors are now writing, whose books someday will be studied in English classes?

That is always a difficult question to answer. Books published now might sell and be popular but in twenty, thirty years time? Which will still be considered Literature?


I have a book, revised 1948, that lists all the one thousand books a 'gentleman' should have read. Most are obvious from The Iliad to Dickens and Thackeray, but who now rates Walter Pater? Or except in parody - Bulwer-Lytton? Both sold fantastic quantities in their time but are rarely read now.

 

[oggbashan]

Every decade or so, someone 'rediscovers' Rudyard Kipling. Is it Literature, or not?

In 1907 he was awarded The Nobel Prize for Literature.


Some of his works such as Stalky and Co. are seriously flawed, but some are great. He was very popular in his day, yet today? Is he the writer of Literature than his contemporaries thought he was?

 

[pecksniff]

Every decade or so, someone 'rediscovers' Rudyard Kipling. Is it Literature, or not?

In 1907 he was awarded The Nobel Prize for Literature.


Some of his works such as Stalky and Co. are seriously flawed, but some are great. He was very popular in his day, yet today? Is he the writer of Literature than his contemporaries thought he was?

I dunno -- is Kipling studied in English classes?

 

[oggbashan]

I dunno -- is Kipling studied in English classes?

Sometimes. I had to read Kim while at school - but that was a very long time ago...

 

[Sean]

I dunno -- is Kipling studied in English classes?

Not any more. Some of his views would be considered...problematic today.

 

[pecksniff]

Not any more. Some of his views would be considered...problematic today.

Oh, yes -- Orwell had some things to say about that (though the essay is mostly admiring).

It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling’s poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge that Kipling is a ‘Fascist’, he falls into the opposite error of defending him where he is not defensible. It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct – on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And yet the ‘Fascist’ charge has to be answered, because the first clue to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that he was not a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane or the most ‘progressive’ person is able to be nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from ‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’. This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the ‘lesser breeds’ are ‘natives’, and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase ‘lesser breeds’ refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are ‘without the Law’ in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas are worth quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry):

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law – Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word – Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Much of Kipling’s phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: ‘Except the lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no ‘Law’, there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in. Kipling’s outlook is pre-fascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results.

But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling’s jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows little sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his solitary novel, The Light That Failed, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.

 

[pecksniff]

Some of his works such as Stalky and Co. are seriously flawed, but some are great

See also Orwell's "Boys' Weeklies":

All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake, for instance, started off quite frankly as an imitation of Sherlock Holmes, and still resembles him fairly strongly; he has hawk-like features, lives in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a dressing-gown when he wants to think. The Gem and Magnet probably owe something to the old school story writers who were flourishing when they began, Gunby Hadath, Desmond Coke and the rest, but they owe more to nineteenth-century models. In so far as Greyfriars and St. Jim’s are like real schools at all, they are much more like Tom Brown’s Rugby than a modern public school. Neither school has an O[fficers’].T[raining].C[orps]., for instance, games are not compulsory, and the boys are even allowed to wear what clothes they like. But without doubt the main origin of these papers is Stalky & Co. This book has had an immense influence on boys’ literature, and it is one of those books which have a sort of traditional reputation among people who have never even seen a copy of it. More than once in boys’ weekly papers I have come across a reference to Stalky & Co. in which the word was spelt ‘Storky’. Even the name of the chief comic among the Greyfriars masters, Mr Prout, is taken from Stalky & Co., and so is much of the slang; ‘jape’, ‘merry’,‘giddy’, ‘bizney’ (business), ‘frabjous’, ‘don’t’ for ‘doesn’t’— all of them out of date even when Gem and Magnet started. There are also traces of earlier origins. The name ‘Greyfriars’ is probably taken from Thackeray, and Gosling, the school porter in the Magnet, talks in an imitation of Dickens’s dialect.

 

[islandman]

Fifty Shades of Grey.

Cause at least one-half of Shakespeare's stuff is shit, and look where he is now.

 

[pecksniff]

Fifty Shades of Grey.

They're gonna do Twilight fanfic in English classes?!

 

[mayfly13]

Not any more. Some of his views would be considered...problematic today.

You mean because Mowgli, who was lost and raised in the jungle was brown not white?

 

[pecksniff]

You mean because Mowgli, who was lost and raised in the jungle was brown not white?

Well, he wasn't doing a Tarzan knockoff -- very different kinda story.

 

[rae121452]

i love john galsworthy. i love arnold bennett ('riceyman steps' is the bomb). i love glenway wescott. all are 'literature' and none are taught.

what will be taught in the future is whatever conforms with current 'intellectual' thinking.

meanwhile, autodidacts will keep literature alive.

 

[pecksniff]

Well, he wasn't doing a Tarzan knockoff -- very different kinda story.

In Tarzan, race matters: At one point it is important that Tarzan's parents' bones are identified as "of the higher Nordic races."

 

[mayfly13]

In Tarzan, race matters: At one point it is important that Tarzan's parents' bones are identified as "of the higher Nordic races."

Yes! Tarzan movies HAD racist elements.
Mowgly, by contrast, had none.
and R.K.'s other short stories enchanted my childhood.

You also made me recall another book "The last of the Mohicans" by Fenimore Cooper.

I loved reading it at the time, it's beautifully written.
It IS a racist book, but out of stupidity not by intent.

I'm surprised that the woke crew haven't erased it yet. They went after better books

 

[Champakian]

I agree with a lot of general sentiment here.

Only history can truly award the status of literature,
and that may be fleeting. Mark Twain comes to mind.

Oh, they love to hate him now...

 

[islandman]

They're gonna do Twilight fanfic in English classes?!

I'd be very surprised if they weren't already. You have to teach to kids' interests.

 

[oggbashan]

Not any more. Some of his views would be considered...problematic today.

Some were considered problematic even then.

His poem 'Recessional' was seen as an attack on the British Empire.

 

[oggbashan]

It is odd how some authors are Literature, and some similar people are not.

For examples:

Conrad, writing in not his native language, is, but Raphael Sabatini isn't.

Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is Literature. Sapper's Bulldog Drummond, isn't. But Bulldog Drummond is very racist by modern standards.

Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung stories were considered marvellous at the time. Now? Who (except Og) reads them?


Is Rider Haggard Literature? Probably not.

So many modern novels are difficult to read. Does that make them Literature? Or will they just fade into obscurity?

 

[pecksniff]

Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is Literature.

Doyle never thought so. And neither do the English profs, AFAIK.

 

[Sean]

You mean because Mowgli, who was lost and raised in the jungle was brown not white?

Fucking hell you're stupid.

 

[pecksniff]

So many modern novels are difficult to read. Does that make them Literature?

True Art is incomprehensible.

 

[torchthebitch]

Try Colson Whitehead.

 

[pecksniff]

I'm very fond of Douglas Coupland -- is anyone teaching him in English classes? A lot of his stuff is literary in the sense that he emphasizes the slice-of-life approach over the well-wrought-tale approach.