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Lionel Stevenson

Author

The Novelist as Fortune Hunter

It is a commonplace that Sir Walter Scott exerted a wide influence over the novelists of his era in their subject-matter and technique. For a generation, the satiric realism of eighteenth-century fiction was almost totally submerged under the tidal-w [...]

Prude’s Progress

Toward the end of 1828, Charles Lamb composed a sonnet which gave him great pleasure by its elaborate construction. It was entitled "The Gypsy's Malison": "Suck, baby, suck, Mother's love grows by giving, Drain the sweet founts that [...]

Romanticism Run to Seed

Among the many delusions entertained by the gen- eral public on subjects about which they know noth-ing whatsoever, one of the most frequent is that of literary spontaneity. Although every real author is well aware that his task demands austere trai [...]

Stepfathers of Victorianism

The year 1826-27 marked one of the crucial events in the development of the English novel. In that year two young men, inordinately ambitious for preeminence in the social and political spheres, decided that fiction was to be their key to the adamant [...]

The Threshold of War

None but the Lonely Heart. By Richard Llewellyn. The Macmillan Company. $2.75. My Days of Anger. By James T. Farrell. The Vanguard Press. $2.75. The Darker Brother. By Bucklin Moon. Doubleday, Doran and Company. $2.50. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. [...]