Another quick post, as I'm away from the homestead - I thought I'd draw your attention to an article I've been reading called 'Brute-Cult'. Well, it's quite long, but I'm just going to reproduce bits of it...
‘I am, I suppose, the average Anglo-Saxon male. I mention [this] because I wish to show where I stand before I proceed to denounce what seems to me the new cult in ultra-highbrow literary circles. (If it isn’t actually a cult now, it’s on the edge of being one.) This is the cult of brutality in fiction.[…] It seems to me a bad sign when cultivated people begin to praise fiction that reads like a police court black list. I am not, you must understand, referring now to the popular sensational or crime novels. I am referring to much more ambitious works of fiction, whose authors are rapidly acquiring big reputations among the ultra-ultras. […] We are suffering just now from a “face-the-unpleasant-facts” snobbery in the criticism of fiction. A novel with a rape in it is like life, we are told; whereas a novel with an ordinary love story in it is simply a shirking of the issue.’
It all seems rather pertinent to me, in the storm of issue-led books which abound today. But… this article, by J.B. Priestley, was written in The Book Society News in 1931. Hmm. Does that make us both right, or both wrong?
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