Notes From a Reader's Journey Through the World of Literature

For some years now I have found myself gravitating toward the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in my "discretionary" fiction reading. I suppose this is because I am too much of a "modern" to be very drawn to what came before--and not "Modernist" enough for what came after.

That said I am much more interested in some parts of that stream of literature than others, the Symbolists, Decadents and company having little interest for me. Good old realism/naturalism appeals to me more strongly than ever these days--particularly where it has been combined with that "discovery of society" of which Karl Polanyi wrote.

Maybe it helps in this that the art critics of our time are so dismissive of such work. Critical respectability has, I think, tended to make me skeptical of the claims for the value of a literary work, rather than the opposite--especially given what the critics have so often been, all the way down to our times.