Book description
How much heavier was Thackeray's brain than Walt Whitman's? Which
novels do American soldiers read? When did cigarettes start making an
appearance in English literature? And, while we're about it, who wrote
the first Western, is there any link between asthma and literary
genius, and what really happened on Dorothea's wedding night in Middlemarch?
In Curiosities of Literature, John Sutherland contemplates
the full import of questions such as these, and attempts a few answers
in a series of essays that are both witty and eclectic. His approach
is also unashamedly discursive. An account of the fast-working Mickey
Spillane, for example, leads to a consideration of the substances,
both legal and illegal, that authors have employed to boost their
creative energies. An essay on good and bad handwriting points out in
passing that Thackeray could write the Lord's Prayer on the back of a
stamp. As for Mary Shelley, a brief recital of the circumstances in
which she wrote Frankenstein stops off to consider what impact
the miserable summer weather of 1816 had on the future path of English
literature.
Of course, it is debatable whether knowledge of these arcane topics
adds to the wisdom of nations, but it does highlight the random
pleasures to be found in reading literature and reading about it. As
John Sutherland rightly asks, 'Why else read?'
John Sutherland has been a professor of literature for a long time
and in many places. Currently he teaches untechnologically at the
California Institute of Technology and is the emeritus Lord
Northcliffe Professor at UCL. He is the author of numerous books,
including the puzzle-collection Is Heathcliff a Murderer?
(probably, yes) and the encyclopaedic Longman Companion to
Victorian Fiction (soon to be reissued in a yet more
encyclopaedic form). In recent years, he has written voluminously on a
variety of literary and non literary topics in, principally, the
Guardian and the Financial Times. His interest in
literature has become more curious over the years.
Martin Rowson is an award-winning cartoonist whose work appears
regularly in the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and
many other publications. His books include a novel, Snatches; a
memoir, Stuff; The Dog Allusion: Gods, Pets and How to Be
Human; and comic book versions of T. S.Eliot's 'The Waste Land'
and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. He smokes and qualifies
as the sharpest literary-pictorial satirist of his time.
