“That this book is strong and that Miss Chopin has a keen knowledge of certain phases of the feminine will not be denied. But it was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction.”
Chicago Times-Herald
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
.
“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer…is marriageableness…. Suicide is more respectable.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, 1961
“Mama says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers.”
Mary Russell Mitford, letter to Sir William Etford, 1815
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Recent war novels have accustomed us all to ugly words and images, but from the mouths of the very young and protected they sound particularly offensive…the ear refuses to believe.”
The New York Herald Tribune Book Review
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, readings/research
“Why has our author selected such a theme? …the nauseous amour of a Puritan pastor, with a frail creature of his charge, whose mind is represented as far more debauched than her body? Is it in short, because a running undertide of filth has become as requisite to a romance, as death in the fifth act of a tragedy? Is the French era actually begun in our literature?”
Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Church Review
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
(It’s worth mentioning that I believe Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. After a sixty-year long episode of writer’s block–when he published mostly articles about the exotic fowl business in which he was engaged in Maine–Henry Roth returned to publish, in the 1990s, just before his death, the superb, dark Mercy of a Rude Stream quartet, one of the great events of my reading life.)
“The book lays all possible stress on the nastiness of the human animal. It is the fashion, and we must make the best of the spectacle of a fine book deliberately and as it were doggedly smeared with verbal filthiness.”
The New York Times Book Review
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
(The post just below this one is a Weekly Text on Langston Hughes’ poem “I, too, sing America,” which is Mr. Hughes’ response to Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing.” This seemed as a good as place as any to post these squibs about Mr. Whitman’s work from these, uh, unperceptive reviewers.)
“No, no, this kind of thing won’t do…. The good folks down below (I mean posterity) will have none of it.”
James Russell Lowell, quoted in The Complete Works, Vol. 14, 1904
“Whitman is as unacquainted with poetry as a hog is with mathematics.”
The London Critic
“Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language.”
William Allingham, letter to W.M. Rossetti, 1857
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
[The New Statesman and Nation was a British publication that resulted in a merger in 1931 between the New Statesman and The Nation and Athenaeum, and is now apparently known simply as New Statesman. In any case, it’s hard to imagine that any magazine in Britain could seriously say that the country, at the time of the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son–1940–was “away from that particular racial problem.”]
“The astounding thing is that the publisher is able to send out with the book a typescript about the weight of a Tor Bay Sole entirely made up of favorable reviews from the American Press. Over here and away from that particular racial problem the book seems unimpressive and silly, not even as much fun as a thriller.”
New Statesman and Nation
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
[Max Nordau published Degeneration—which is, interestingly, available as a available for free download as a PDF here— in 1892; the book was a precursor to some of the “decline of the West” rhetoric the Nazi party employed. Given that Nordau himself was Jewish, and a co-founder of the World Zionist Organization, that fact remains a particularly bitter irony. It’s also important to remember that the Nazis famously mounted an exhibition called “Entarte Kunst” which means “Degenerate Art.” This exhibition of modernist art aimed to show the extent to which the works shown, many of them by Jewish artists, “insult[ed] German feeling.” Here, Nordau turns his withering gaze on one of the greatest of American poets, Walt Whitman.]
“He was a vagabond, a reprobate, and his poems contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature could hardly be found with author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew him to the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime.”
Max Nordau, Degeneration, 1895.
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“No matter of careful recording of detail or of poetic heightening of feeling can supply what is absent here–the understanding which is vital whether a character in fiction merely takes a walk or commits incest….”
Commonweal
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged black history, lgbtq history, literary oddities
(It’s important to remember that at the time of its publication, Moby Dick met mixed critical reception, to say the least; it really didn’t emerge as the classic it is now regarded until around 1921, when critics, beginning with Carl Van Doren, reappraised the novel as a masterpiece.)
“…an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter of fact…Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his errors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature–since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist,”
Athenaeum
“Redburn was a stupid failure, Mardi was hopelessly dull, White Jacket was worse than either; and, in fact, was such a very bad book, that, until the appearance of Moby Dick whe had set it down as the very ultimatum of weakness to which the author could attain. It seems, however, that we were mistaken. In bombast, in caricature, in rhetorical artifice–generally as clumsy as it is ineffectual–and in low attempts at humor, each of his volumes has been an advance upon its predecessors.”
Democratic Review
“The captain’s ravings and those of Mr. Melville are such as would justify writ de lunatico against all parties.”
Southern Quarterly Review
“…a huge dose of hyperbolical slang, maudlin sentimentalism, and track-comic bubble and squeak.”
William Harrison Ainsworth, New Monthly Magazine
“This sea novel is a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection upon the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad….”
The Spectator
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.