By John Sutherland
Girl Chatterley's Lover. The Blue Lagoon. Portnoy's criticism. The Da Vinci Code. For the final century, the tastes and personal tastes of the typical reader were mirrored within the American and British bestseller lists, and this Very brief creation takes an enticing glance through the lists to bare what we have now been reading--and why. John Sutherland indicates that bestseller lists computer screen one of many most powerful pulses in glossy literature and are hence valuable of great learn. Exploring the connection among bestsellers and the models, ideologies, and cultural issues of the day, the e-book contains brief case-studies and vigorous summaries of bestsellers during the years:
from In His Steps--now nearly completely forgotten, however the greatest all-time bestseller among 1895 and 1945--to long past with the Wind, The Andromeda pressure, and The Da Vinci Code. Discussing either vintage and modern novels, along a few amazing titles and long-forgotten names. Sutherland lifts the lid at the bestseller undefined, revealing what makes a ebook right into a bestseller and what separates bestsellers from canonical fiction.
Read or Download Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) PDF
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Additional info for Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Example text
Gynecia and Basilius’s relationship reprises the stock figures of the old husband and young wife of medieval fabliau: ‘He, being already well stricken in years, married a young princess named Gynecia … of notable beauty’ (NA, p. 76). 24 Basilius can be seen partly as stock comic characterization but it is the comparison between Basilius and Gynecia that is Sidney’s invention and that significantly alters the tone of the characterization. 25 When Gynecia sees through Pyrocles’s Amazonian disguise to the Prince beneath, the tenor of the episodes changes.
9 In a sense Arcadia owes more to medieval ideas of entrelacement than it does to the then popular fashion for shorter, incident-based narratives. The differences between the interests and effects of Arcadia and some of its close contemporaries in prose fiction can also be understood through Donald Beecher’s account of Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession. 11 In most cases in Riche’s and Painter’s writing it is the sense of experimenting with the number of different ways that basic incidents can be re-run that is 28 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre the focus rather than the how or the why of the situation.
Arcadia’s use of interconnected narratives has more in common with the complicated structure of Greek romances than with the collections of stories that were so popular in the middle to late sixteenth century and were derived from Italian, Spanish and Portuguese novellae. 9 In a sense Arcadia owes more to medieval ideas of entrelacement than it does to the then popular fashion for shorter, incident-based narratives. The differences between the interests and effects of Arcadia and some of its close contemporaries in prose fiction can also be understood through Donald Beecher’s account of Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession.