From Hard Drive: Stephen King helps George R. R. Martin finish the A Song of Ice and Fire series.
Category: Reblogged
Before Daredevil was kicking butt he was trying to bring a fallen star to his girlfriend. Let’s have a look at Stardust.
For me, Stardust was one of those films that someone else had decided to watch in the house. Sure, it didn’t contain Scott Adkins or a single-car chase, but it was enjoyable enough to not find something else to do.
As for the book, I think it is easiest to say that the younger me only successfully finished one Neil Gaiman book. The one he co-wrote. You know which one. The greatest book ever written.
I don’t know how many Gaiman books and adaptations I’ve tried over the years, but I tend to have a similar reaction to them. Aside from Good Omens, I’m always left feeling Gaiman’s work has promise but doesn’t grab me.
Is it just me?
It’s time to discuss Starship Troopers. Again.
The first time I watched Starship Troopers all I saw was a cheesy B-grade action movie. This was also what many movie reviewers thought at the time. Many years later I finally read the book and it clicked.
Verhoeven’s film only made sense to me after I’d read the book as it is as much a critique of the material as it is an adaptation.
“I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring,” says Verhoeven of his attempts to read Heinlein’s opus. “It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn’t read the thing. It’s a very right-wing book. And with the movie we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be eat your cake and have it. All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, ‘Are these people crazy?’ Source
The cheesy propaganda segments riff on the heavy-handed philosophical lecturing Heinlein does. The proud militarism is given consequence by utilising Heinlein’s own references to disabled veterans and by showing horrible training injuries and battlefield scenes. The fascist elements are played up for farce in the uniforms and sequences mirroring actual Nazi propaganda films.
Michael Ironside asked, “Why are you doing a right-wing fascist movie?”
Verhoeven replied, “If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn’t work, no one will listen to me. So I’m going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it’s only good for killing fucking Bugs!” Source
Now, I did actually enjoy the book. It is very interesting and many of the ideas were challengingly different. The portrayal of future warfare was, at the time, as imaginative as I’d come across. So Verhoeven’s reaction to satirise the book – one that Heinlein dashed out as an angry response to the US stopping nuclear tests – was probably overwrought by his childhood in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. But if the movie adaptation had been faithful we’d probably have seen the worst elements of Heinlein’s ideas paraded around like something produced by the Ministry of Enlightenment.
Well, either that or a schlocky B-grade action movie about the military killing alien bugs.
I’ve covered this book previously when other Youtube channels have discussed Starship Troopers. The first was What’s the Difference by Cinefix, which breaks down the differences. The second was from Wisecrack on how the movie makes fascism look good, despite Verhoeven’s intentions.
Let’s dive into the book and movie that made Sean Connery give up acting and Alan Moore give Hollywood the finger.
This is one of those rare instances where I can say I didn’t like the book or the movie.
Back when I was graduating from junior to adult fiction, I went through a phase of reading all of the classic adventure novels. Everything from Tom Sawyer to Dracula. As such, I was familiar with every character Alan Moore put into his comic and none of them sat well with me. They were all slightly facile and nastier versions of the characters and stories I’d appreciated – love is far too strong a word.
When it came to the movie I was blown away by how terribly hamfisted it all was. Nothing in the movie really worked, despite there clearly being some talent involved.
For me, the worst part of the movie was Dorian Grey. I’d actually only gotten to that novel shortly before The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie came out so the character was fresh in my mind. To say that the character portrayed and the one from the novel were nothing alike is an understatement. Even the comic version is taking only the cliff notes version of the character.
It makes you wonder why either book or movie versions decided to use these public domain characters rather than make their own?
Oh look, Moore has commented on that, saying:
“The planet of the imagination is as old as we are. It has been humanity’s constant companion with all of its fictional locations, like Mount Olympus and the gods, and since we first came down from the trees, basically. It seems very important, otherwise, we wouldn’t have it.“
And:
“…it could be said that the theme of using popular fictional characters to comment on cultural and political mores has been carried over to “The Black Dossier” and the next volume of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” Source.
Or in other words, he thought it would be a cool narrative technique that might attract some readers. Not sure what the movie makers were thinking other than “franchise, franchise, franchise” while dancing in a conga line.
Let’s have a look at one of the adaptations of Matilda by Roald Dahl in this What’s the Difference?
Recently our youngest has been on something of a Roald Dahl and Dick King-Smith read-a-thon. She is very much looking forward to the new Matilda film coming out soon and very much enjoyed the book.
Part of the reason for her enjoyment was that, unlike The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith, the movie protagonist is a girl just like in the book.
“Why would they make the girl into a boy for the film?”
Yes, Hollywood, why indeed.
I can vaguely remember watching the 90s film Matilda and enjoying it. Our youngest loved it. And we’ll inevitably sit down as a family to watch the new version. And this is in no small part due to the lack of kids books and adaptations featuring a female protagonist. You have to make the most of the handful of female-lead books and movies aimed at the middle-grade audience (YA is better served but comes with slightly more stabbings and blood-drinking than we’re comfortable exposing a kid to).
As with many of Dahl’s children’s books, the treatment of kids comes from a different era. Matilda was published in 1988, yet much of the way schools were run had already begun to change by then. In many ways, the mistreatment of students by teachers would probably feel more familiar to my parent’s generation than it does to me, and feels odd to our kids. Yet it still manages to be entertaining to kids, if our children are any barometer of what kids these days like.
Update: the new adaptation was good. Our youngest has already watched it twice.
If you like spies, then this instalment of Lost in Adaptation will be for you.
Many many years ago I decided I loved spy novels and read the Game, Set, Match series by Len Deighton. Not satisfied with books that mostly went over my head, I was recommended some John Le Carre. Again, I feel like the much younger me got lost in the ins and out of the spy world of Le Carre’s stories.
But then two things happened. The first was they made a pretty decent film adaptation of Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. Then they cast Tom Hiddleston in a star-studded series adaptation of The Night Manager. So obviously, I was ready for my Le Carre.
I think the TV series was okay. The acting was just terrific, particularly from a relative Aussie newcomer in Elizabeth Debicki, but a lot of the scenes and details felt contrived. This really undermined any tension for me.
For example, the main antagonist played by Hugh Laurie is continually suspicious of everyone around him, but he is just a little bit too ready to accept Tom Hiddleston’s protagonist into the fold. “Here you go, you’re now in charge of one of my shell companies!” This would have been better if it was also great blackmail and/or worked as some sort of leverage against a potential spy (or maybe it was and I just forget that detail).
At some stage, the more mature and debonair me will revisit some of the books and authors I read when I was probably too young to appreciate them. Le Carre and Deighton are on that list.
I will resist the urge to use Burgess’ slang in this entire What’s the Difference with A Clockwork Orange.
Despite having previously covered A Clockwork Orange, Dominic’s video raised some points I didn’t discuss.
The mention of the missing chapter in the US editions of the book reminded me of the far more acceptable British version I had read. Because it has been quite some time since I read the book, I had forgotten entirely that Burgess had ultimately said “people grow up” or can actually change. Leaving this out of the US version and thus the film is both bad form and entirely American.
Given that most of the novel is essentially a drawn-out complaint about kids these days, it’s kinda important to acknowledge that ultimate point by Burgess. But in the land of gun-toting ‘Mericans, it makes sense they’d prefer the ending that justifies them standing on their porch with a shotgun grunting “get off my lawn.”
The other thing I was reminded of was the lexicon glossary. Burgess included a section (at the end? Could have been at the beginning) that roughly translated the slang into something approaching English. I can still remember continuously flipping back and forth as I read, deciphering as I went. It wasn’t a long novel, but I do remember doing this for the whole book.
I wonder if a more mature me would have more or less trouble with this slang aspect? I do know the more mature me would certainly have less patience.
In this month’s What’s the Difference? it’s time to see which version of the material is the correct one with Rashomon.
I’m going to be honest and say that until watching the above video, I’d never heard of Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Of course, I was aware of the Rashomon Effect, just trust me that my definition of it is correct. And it is hard to call yourself a movie lover if you aren’t able to name at least two Akira Kurosawa films.
I’m not a true movie lower though. I can only name the Kurosawa films made into Spaghetti Westerns: Yojimbo (A Fistfull of Dollars) and Seven Samurai (The Magnificent Seven). At least now I can name three.
Remember that time Leonardo DiCaprio used to date women his own age? Me neither. So let’s reminisce together and look at What’s the Difference between the book and the movie of The Beach.
The Beach was one of those books I picked up and put down. I can’t remember if that was before or after the movie – who am I kidding, it was probably after. But I do know that after watching the film, I’ve felt no compulsion to rewatch the film nor retry reading the book.
As Dominic discusses in his summary of the themes in the video, the hypocrisy of the characters wanting to find the non-tourist trap locations that only they can be tourists in is a great idea. But I’m not sure this idea was explored in an interesting enough way. Maybe it was in the book, hence its word-of-mouth success. Or maybe the book just executed a more engaging narrative that twenty-something me didn’t appreciate – I bet there wasn’t a single chapter devoted to things exploding after someone performed an amazingly athletic flying kick detailed in multiple paragraphs.
Actually, there’s an idea for a reboot: The Beach starring The Rock.
Time for some Toni Morrison and her most cancelled book.
Beloved is the magnum opus of the late, great Toni Morrison. It has become a key piece of literature taught in schools and is considered one of the great pieces of American literature. To understand Beloved, we must first look at the woman behind the pages: Nobel Prize Winner Toni Morrison.
Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres, and why we love to read. It’s Lit is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
This month in What’s the Difference? let’s discuss a classic five-part novel trilogy and its movie adaptation.
I love the Hitchhiker’s books. In the above videos, Dominic Noble covers a lot of what was changed from the book(s) to the movie and I agree with his points about how they managed to ruin the adaptation. But unlike Dominic, I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about the movie. I think this comes down to how I largely dismissed the film as either:
- A very American homage to the Hitchhiker’s books, or;
- A very soulless adaptation by the Hollywood machine.
Take, for example, the point about Arthur Dent being portrayed as a snivelling loser with all the cringe humour to support that portrayal. I really don’t enjoy cringe humour and laughing at “losers”. Having them be the main character is an even worse idea. But I can see how an American or Hollywood adaptation would take the idea of an incompetent and insecure (i.e. British) character and make them into Loser McCringefest.
The stamp of this failure to understand what the jokes actually were is all over the movie. And it seems to be a common problem when American studios take British material and try to adapt it. There are numerous TV shows that American audiences have loved, which a production studio takes as the impetus to make a version without subtitles*, and then somehow they make a pilot or show that just mangles the entire point. American audiences really deserve better.
There’s actually a good documentary on this issue done as part of the Red Dwarf DVD extras. Essentially, the production studios don’t really understand what is funny about the source material and thus what any changes they make will do to the adaptation.
So I don’t hate the movie adaptation of one of my favourite books. Because I don’t regard it as a real adaptation.
* Oh, you think I jest? I’m afraid not. When I visited the US of A I was surprised to see subtitles being used when people of non-North American origin spoke English. I mean, Scottish people having subtitles I can kinda understand, but Irish people? At least it was good to bust the myth that Americans can’t watch stuff with subtitles…
And so it goes, in this month’s It’s Lit!
I have to admit to only having read two of Vonnegut’s books. Obviously the first is Slaughterhouse Five, because you can’t talk about books on the internet (or anywhere else for that matter) unless you’ve read it. The second is the short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House.
Two of my favourite short stories are in Welcome to the Monkey House, the eponymous short the collection is named after, and Harrison Bergeron. The latter was used in our high school English Literature class. Don’t ask me why it was used or what we discussed about it, I only remember it being refreshingly good after too many weeks spent reading ee cummings.
I think the reason I’ve not read more Vonnegut is that I never really bonded with his work. Sure, he wrote two of my favourite short stories, but that same collection also had some really bland stuff in it that could be best described as unmemorable. And some of his satirical takes were, as the famous philosopher said, meh.
Like the afformentioned short stories, which appear to critique egalitarianism by attacking a strawperson (because egalitarianism doesn’t seek to eliminate individualism nor enforce mediocrity for all). Is that really satire or is it misrepresentation? Or did I just miss something? Because I didn’t miss the “corrective rape”… ewww.
Further reading: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/bjur/vol4/iss1/7/
It can be said that there are two types of fiction writers – those who take a backseat and let their work take the spotlight, and those who are as iconic as their work, sometimes even more so. But maybe there’s a third type – a type of writer whose complex persona is so intertwined with their fiction – that to ignore them as a person would be to ignore their work entirely. In this episode we explore the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut.
Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres, and why we love to read. It’s Lit is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
Do you need a summary of Jane Austen’s novels and heroes? Then this month’s It’s Lit! has you covered.
Elizabeth Bennet. Emma Woodhouse. Marianne Dashwood. Jane Austen has been responsible for creating some of the most frequently adapted and analyzed women in the English literary language. Along with Buzzfeed quizzes asking “which SATC or Little Women” character you are, there is always a lot of fanfare about which Jane Austen heroine you are.
But beyond the big three. Well mostly … big two. Who are the women of Jane Austen’s completed novels? How do they reveal to us, her modern audience, any insight into her growth as an author, her politics, and just how she feels about what makes a girlboss and #girlboss.
Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres, and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
This month’s It’d Lit! is all about stealing your story ideas from others.
I’ve previously discussed how few plots there are and how certain archetypes trace their origins back as far as we have records for. One example of this is the wandering hero, or knight errant, arriving in town to take on the bad guys before moving off for the next adventure. This is a popular genre – think Jack Reacher – and has its origins at least as far back as the Greek myths and East Asian folklore.
So is this recycling or is it about the formula storytellers use as the basic backbone to hang their narrative off of?
I’d argue the latter. This is especially true of the examples of “inspired by” or “fan-fic” from the video (and elsewhere). The storyteller will have been thinking about that awesome story and what they’d have liked to do differently, or set it in a different location.
For example, the best Die Hard sequels haven’t been in the Die Hard franchise. Instead, they have been Die Hard On a Bus, or Die Hard On a Plane, or Die Hard In the Whitehouse. The fact you probably know exactly which movies those refer to shows how the basic premise being adapted doesn’t cut down on the creativity. Well, mostly.
And even if the recycling isn’t quite as overt as Die Hard On a Boat, all stories are inspired by or are a combination of the stories that came before. The storyteller has to start somewhere. Preferably not with Die Hard On a Train, the sequel to Die Hard On a Boat.
From James Joyce’s Ulysses to Bridget Jones’s Diary, you’ve probably read a book that was just a modern retelling of a well-established story. Which is to say nothing of other forms of media and their own obsessions with retellings.
And despite what your Writing 101 instincts might tell you, this is neither bad nor lazy writing—or even a new concept. Because let’s be honest: sometimes a story is just so dang good, it bears repeating. Sometimes more than once. Sometimes multiple times. I’m looking at you, Jane Austen.
Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
With the new Dune movie coming soon, it’s time to look at the 80s adaptation’s differences from the classic novel.
On the train to work the other day I noticed that in my carriage half the people reading books were reading Dune – mostly the first novel but some were reading other parts of the series. It was somewhat surprising.
Then about a week later I was in a book store and saw that they had an entire shelf of Dune novels and a new edition of the first novel in piles at the front of the store. It was then that I remembered Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation was coming out soon.
Now of course, I’m so ahead of the game that I read Dune *checks notes* 3 years ago. I even discussed the Dune series’ importance just last year.
For me the main thing about the David Lynch adaptation was that it needed to be a political thriller. Instead it was a drama.
Not that the film isn’t without tension and thrills, like the running across the desert without the thumpers and trying to avoid the worms. But the book needed to be stripped back to that political thriller plot to hang the conflict and civil war on.
I’m not sure what Villeneuve plans to do, but he is a very accomplished storyteller. It will be interesting to see if he succeeds where Lynch managed to find himself crying in the corner he’d painted himself into.
Dune is coming back to the big screen while Denis Villenueve and Timothee Chalamet crashing a sandworm into your HBO Max as well, so it’s time to take a look back at the adaptation from David Lynch back in 1984. Based on the Frank Herbert epic, Dune is considered to be one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time. So how did an indie auteur make a big budget Hollywood adaptation out of a dense fantasy epic? It’s time to remember, fear is the mind killer as we ask, What’s the Difference?
Starring Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides, Sting as the space-underwear clad Feyd-Rautha and the soon-to-be Captain Picard Patrick Stewart, Lynch brought together a fascinating group of 80s character actors like Dean Stockwell, Linda Hunt and Jurgen Prochnow to fill out the cast. A critical and commercial failure when it came out, and in light of prior failed attempts to adapt the sci fi fantasy all-timer, which included Jodorowsky’s Dune, the book was long thought to be unfilmable. With the Atreides and Harkonnen rekindling their big screen rivalry in the form of Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Zendaya and a cast as stellar as the one Lynch assembled, we’ll see how 2021’s adaptation fares.
With a new Bond movie set for theaters, it’s time to look back at the first James Bond adventure and ask, What’s the Difference?
I still haven’t picked up any of the Bond books. Previously I’ve mentioned having vague memories of reading a couple when I was younger. But honestly, they could have been Biggles books.
Side note: as a kid I always thought that Biggles and his friends were gay. I didn’t really know what that was exactly, but they were definitely it. Monty Python agreed. Pity it wasn’t championed a bit more.
Seeing the differences outlined between the Dr No book and film does highlight an issue with plot vs character adaptation. Especially for a series. Change one and you have to change the other.
Although, it would be interesting to see how a cardboard thin character could be slotted into any plot without change. Like say the majority of Jason Statham’s roles.
No Time to Die finds James Bond, Her Majesty’s most infamous double-oh, retired in Jamaica. But we’re going all the way back to the first time Sean Connery as 007 found his way to the Caribbean Island in 1962’s Doctor No. But while it was the first Bond adventure in the film franchise, it was the sixth book author Ian Fleming published. So how did the filmmakers set about adapting the middle of Bond’s novel career for the beginning of his film escapade? Dust off your license to kill because it’s time to ask, “Difference… What’s the Difference?”
This month’s It’s Lit is going to talk about one of the most controversial classics of literature.
I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn when I was very young. The former was an easy and entertaining read, but the latter I remember being a slog to get through. When I revisited Huck Finn as an adult I came across some history of the book which suggested Twain had battled to write the book over many years. This was certainly how the novel felt in reading.
Both times I read Huck Finn, I was struck by just how infantalised Jim’s character was. It felt wrong. And giving it any level of thought leads you to conclude that this was the way white people viewed African Americans at the time the book was written.
You could argue that this is to draw the reader in and have them empathise with the plight of African Americans. But then wouldn’t you also have Jim grow to become an adult equal to other people by the end of the novel? Or was that something Twain struggled with, as it may have not being judged “realistic” to his audience?
Previously, I’ve discussed banned books and Huckleberry Finn. Something this video raised is what I had said about schools teaching Huck Finn, and that is the idea of complex discussions. It’s hard to teach an older text, provide the context, provide the complex subject matter, and do it all justice. Especially when that subject and context is something like racism.
People might say they are no longer teaching or will attempt to ban Huck Finn because of the N-word. But realistically, it’s because they aren’t willing to put the effort into teaching a complex topic and text. Double that unwillingness if they are someone who wants to pretend racism doesn’t exist.
I’m still a fan of old Samuel Clemens. But as noted in the video, this book isn’t without flaws and there are plenty of other authors and books who probably need highlighting more than Twain and Huck Finn.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by American author Mark Twain is both considered one of the great American novels and one of the most frequently banned and contested novels due to its use of the N-word and racial stereotypes. This has launched many debates as to if the work should even be taught in schools.
Today we are going to attempt to crack the case: is Huckleberry Finn an anti-racist work? Or is it just plain ol’ racist?
Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres, and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
Did you know that Quentin Tarantino had novelised his ninth film? Neither did I. Let’s take a look and What’s the Difference?
As a Tarantino fan since the early 90s – geez, that makes me sound even older than I am – I have to come clean on Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. I didn’t like it.
I’ll even go a step further and say that his previous film, Hateful Eight, wasn’t good either.
Unlike Hateful Eight, which had a decisive moment when the film fell apart (Tarantino’s voice over setting up the third act just ruined everything for me), Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was entirely pedestrian. It always felt like a film avoiding being anything other than a love letter to Hollywood films of the 60s.
In fairness to the movie, Tarantino was clearly trying to subvert many of the usual movie moments and be more about actors making great films. For example, the scene at the ranch was setup for a fight for Pitt’s character (Cliff Booth) and the Manson acolytes. Instead, Tarantino subverts that moment and there is no fight, allowing us plenty more time for DiCaprio’s character to learn about method acting from his child co-star.
That the novelisation is quite different from the film isn’t particularly surprising. It’s pretty difficult to make Brad Pitt into a thoroughly unlikable character in a movie. Something to do with charisma and production credits. But the book is unconstrained by actor charisma, which makes it a good opportunity to throw the character under the bus.
Regardless of Tarantino’s future literary aspirations, I hope his tenth/final film is able to cement his career as one of the greats.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Who is Cliff Booth anyway?
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a celebrated installment in writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre. So when he came out with a book adaptation of the story, we were first in line to read it. But was the book markedly different from the film, and do those differences mean something big? We think so and we’ll explain in this Book vs. Film on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – The New Ending.
Words are helpful in expressing ideas. So it is no surprise that authors, who sometimes try to express ideas, need to make a few words up. This video from PBS Other Words goes through a few examples.
I’m currently reading The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent. A topic discussed in the book was on how language and culture shape how we think and express ourselves. So the ability to craft out language is an important skill to advance not only language, but also culture and society and potentially the way we think.
Personally, I’m trying to make the word beveragement catch on.
This month’s It’s Lit covers Amatory Fiction.
This is an interesting video for several reasons. I’m always amused when the topic of rethinking “great authors” comes up and people without pearls start clutching them.
The literary canon excluding certain types of authors and books shouldn’t be news to people. But there always seems to be plenty of reactionary debate making excuses for why, for example, Grapes of Wrath got published while Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown (written the same year on the same topic, both using Babb’s notes) took 65 years to be released. Yeah, that was a thing.
I’ve covered this before when calls have been made to increase the diversity of the literary lists for students in the hopes that more diversity of texts will be taught. Getting people who don’t read much to acknowledge that “literary greats” are less about talent than luck (timing, contacts, $$, etc) is a hard task. Trying to get those same people to acknowledge that women, people of colour, and non-Americans might have written books throughout history is often a hurdle they are unwilling to even attempt jumping.
Which brings me around to one of my favourite topics here: snobbery and guilty pleasures. The It’s Lit video shows how snobbery essentially relegated an important part of literature to the unknown and unappreciated baskets of history. Combine that snobbery with a bit of the old bigotry of the pants and you will have people trying to ignore a segment of literature that broke boundaries (e.g. Behn wrote one of the earliest anti-slavery novels).
For more on Sanora Babb’s novel, it is worth watching this video:
The guy typically credited with inventing what we know as the modern novel was Miguel de Cervantes with his cumbersome 800+ page book, Don Quixote. But what if I told you that the real antecedent for the modern novel was created by… ladies.
Before the rise of what would become the modern novel, there was Amatory fiction. Amatory fiction was a genre of fiction that became popular in Britain in the late 17th century and early 18th century. As its name implies, amatory fiction is preoccupied with sexual love and romance. Most of its works were short stories, it was dominated by women, and women were the ones responsible for sharing and promoting their own work.
Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres, and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
Tyson Adams 