Post by account_disabled on Jan 3, 2024 5:20:31 GMT
By observing - and reading - the ancient and modern classics we get an idea of how the way of writing literature has changed . I'm not just talking about language, undoubtedly language changes and evolves, but also about the structure of the works, about narration. The feeling I had is that once upon a time there was a more direct relationship between author and reader , a closeness that has gradually disappeared, giving way to a detachment, a certain coldness. As if the author wanted to say: "my place is this and yours, reader, is that". Some elements, previously present in literary works, are now rarely found. Some manage to survive, they pop up here and there in some novels, but in general literature has lost that sumptuousness, that elegance, that it once possessed. And that brotherhood, too, that direct, close contact with the readers.
The division of the work into books I have always liked dividing a novel into books . I can't explain why, perhaps because it reminds me of the past, an ancient way of dividing the subject to be treated. Frankenstein is divided into three volumes , however, with an introduction by the author and a preface by her husband Percy . Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings also features this division into books. What meaning do books have? That of grouping the chapters within a general topic . In The Lord of the Rings we find this Special Data subdivision: Part I – The Fellowship of the Ring Book I Chapter I – A long-awaited celebration Chapter II – The shadow of the past etc. The dedication Not the one used today, reduced to a phrase. In Machiavelli's The Prince there is a dedication to Lorenzo de' Medici. It's a page long. But that type of dedication has a different meaning than today. In Don Quixote de la Mancha Miguel De Cervantes dedicates the work to the Duke of Béjar, writing: Certain of the good reception and honor that Your Excellency grants to all sorts of books [...] I decided to give birth to The imaginative knight Don Quixote of La Mancha with the patronage of the very clear name of Your Excellency.
Between the 16th and 17th centuries it was a sort of homage to the powerful of the time , and in fact the more correct name is dedicatory (in Latin it was called epistola nuncupatoria ): a solemn homage, therefore, by the author to an illustrious figure of his era. The letter to the reader In Gulliver's Travels we read "The publisher to the reader", even if in this case it refers to a fictitious character, a certain Richard Sympson, Gulliver's cousin and friend. Also in Foscolo's The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis there is “To the reader”, in which one of the characters of the novel, Lorenzo Alderani, a friend of Ortis, attempts “to erect a monument to unknown virtue; and to consecrate to the memory of my only friend those tears, which I am now forbidden to shed at his tomb." That letter had – or wanted to have – a flavor of authenticity . Immerse the reader even more in the story. Let us remember that in The Betrothed there was a similar expedient: the fiction that it was a manuscript from the 1600s. Ditto for novels like Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and others.
The division of the work into books I have always liked dividing a novel into books . I can't explain why, perhaps because it reminds me of the past, an ancient way of dividing the subject to be treated. Frankenstein is divided into three volumes , however, with an introduction by the author and a preface by her husband Percy . Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings also features this division into books. What meaning do books have? That of grouping the chapters within a general topic . In The Lord of the Rings we find this Special Data subdivision: Part I – The Fellowship of the Ring Book I Chapter I – A long-awaited celebration Chapter II – The shadow of the past etc. The dedication Not the one used today, reduced to a phrase. In Machiavelli's The Prince there is a dedication to Lorenzo de' Medici. It's a page long. But that type of dedication has a different meaning than today. In Don Quixote de la Mancha Miguel De Cervantes dedicates the work to the Duke of Béjar, writing: Certain of the good reception and honor that Your Excellency grants to all sorts of books [...] I decided to give birth to The imaginative knight Don Quixote of La Mancha with the patronage of the very clear name of Your Excellency.
Between the 16th and 17th centuries it was a sort of homage to the powerful of the time , and in fact the more correct name is dedicatory (in Latin it was called epistola nuncupatoria ): a solemn homage, therefore, by the author to an illustrious figure of his era. The letter to the reader In Gulliver's Travels we read "The publisher to the reader", even if in this case it refers to a fictitious character, a certain Richard Sympson, Gulliver's cousin and friend. Also in Foscolo's The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis there is “To the reader”, in which one of the characters of the novel, Lorenzo Alderani, a friend of Ortis, attempts “to erect a monument to unknown virtue; and to consecrate to the memory of my only friend those tears, which I am now forbidden to shed at his tomb." That letter had – or wanted to have – a flavor of authenticity . Immerse the reader even more in the story. Let us remember that in The Betrothed there was a similar expedient: the fiction that it was a manuscript from the 1600s. Ditto for novels like Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and others.