I’m sorry there’s someone in the notes who’s onboard with this except for the political stuff because they claim that overtly political works are forgettable and didn’t stand the test of time because of their political bent.
And then they claim that the political SJW stuff in Dickens is subtle.
Which they differentiate from the penny dreadfuls and popular magazines of the time. Dickens was GOOD, not like that by-the-word popular crap.
Just for the record, if you’re not familiar with Dickens, here’s a little bit from his wikipedia bio:
His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5]Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience’s reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife’s chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.
Yeah, Dickens is nothing at all like the MCU with its crowd-pleasing shot of SJW WOMEN SUPERS trying to cash in on a moment. THE ENTIRE PLOT OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL IS WORKER’S RIGHTS WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???????????
Shakespeare is intensely political - what the fuck do you think the Richard plays are if not anti-Plantagenet propaganda?
Austen is WILDLY, VICIOUSLY political like seriously how many fucking times does Austen write about women who are getting absolutely fucked by the society that they’re living in and have to throw themselves on the mercy of kind relatives or hope that they can marry a kind husband spoilers it is all of the times, that is just a huge, ridiculous, outsized portion of what Austen wrote.
Mark Twain is mind-bogglingly political. You know what didn’t stand the test of time? Tom Sawyer, Detective. You know what did survive? The Adventures of Fuck Your Racist, White Supremacist System.
My university required that students take one of three Major Authors classes before they could graduate with a degree in English Literature. Our choices were Shakespeare (already discussed for his political commentary), Chaucer (whose negative characterization of the church was so overwhelming that it’s one of the jokes that actually made it in to A Knight’s Tale), and Milton, whose work you can only consider apolitical if you know absolutely nothing about Milton:
The reality is that if a work survives a hundred years most readers are not going to recognize the politics of the work. Shakespeare seems apolitical to an American audience only until we cast someone who looks like Donald Trump or Barack Obama to play Julius Caesar and THEN we get why there might have been something to do with politics in the original play.
This post initially got started because I’d been commenting on a post about Twin Peaks and its symbolism and there’s a joke in there about how the curtains are red, sure, but people got mad about the “political,” anti-nuclear messaging of the new series of Twin Peaks while totally overlooking the fact that the first two seasons are ENTIRELY AND ONE HUNDRED PERCENT ABOUT HOW A SOCIETY ALLOWED AN ABUSER TO FLOURISH UNCHECKED. That is not apolitical! This is a work that says “what if a society allowed a teenage girl to be sexually trafficked, to be forced into drug trade, to be physically and mentally abused, and still expected her to project normalcy? What happens to the girl and the society? What makes that possible?” and the answer is AN OLD EVIL IN THE WOODS THAT HAS ALWAYS EXISTED AND THAT EACH MAN HAS TO FACE IN HIMSELF OR BE LOST FOREVER TO DARKNESS . Twin Peaks is SO FUCKING POLITICAL.
And we’re still talking about it thirty years later because it was also good.
And this commenter is saying “we don’t remember shitty didactic novels because they were too political and were bad, if it was good and the politics didn’t clutter it up we remembered it” and no, bud, almost everything that DID survive is hardcore political in some way or another but you don’t have the historical context to feel it’s political in the same way that you feel including “gay people for the sake of gay people” is political.
OSCAR FUCKING WILDE DIDN’T GO TO PRISON FOR BEING AS QUEER AS A THREE DOLLAR BILL FOR YOU TO PRETEND THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST IS APOLITICAL.
Is it a cute play about cute characters saying witty things? Yes. It’s also about being separated from yourself and not knowing the fundamentals of who and what you are because that was taken away from you by the institutions society sets up to raise you. It is about falling in love with a name and wanting to have that name because it is what is named that allows you to safely function in society and have a pretty wife and cucumber sandwiches instead of being confirmed bachelors with your dear friend Jack who comes into your home uninvited to lounge beautifully on your sofa.
So if you’re talking about survivorship bias, if you are looking at any work that we consider to be “Important” or part of the “Western Canon” that book is, without exception, deeply political - you just don’t see the politics because you’re reading it completely out of context.
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