Anubis, That is what I meant - Shakespeare and Dickens at the "High" end, romantic romances and AC at the "Low" (according to Mum). However, as has been said here both Shakespeare and Dickens wrote for the crowd rather than for "highbrow" critics. They simply did a fantastic job of it.
I wonder, P Lombard, vis a vis your last sentence about cynicism and difficulty of the modernists, is that why Miss Marple's nephew is said by her to write what she call, I believe, but not quoting the actual words she used, awful books about awful people. Does Raymond, is it, encapsulate the errors of this movement? - with what Miss Marple would see as unwholesome ideas. In Carribbean Mystery (or Murder) Miss Marple has more to say about modern ideas on, for instance sex, and she seems to be saying that people were natural, wholesome and balanced in her young day, but that people make a song and a dance about the wrong things today. She is particularly down on modern notions (well modern for when Caribbean Mystery was written) on psychology. I suppose modernism sprung for psychological science and ideas about behaviourism, and human conduct being guided by the natural instincts like the animals. With this in mind, exploring all the extremes of huan behaviour would seem relevant, as these extremes would all be part of natural - not bad. Miss Marple's notion of sex being sin, from her young days, would have been seen, by many highbrows, post 1930, as hopelessly old-fashioned and irrelevant.
I think you are right Griselda. Awful books about awful people is definitely a way someone who does not like modernism would describe modernist novels. One could argue, for example, that Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises makes a song and dance about the wrong things (antisemitism, people drifting aimlessly through life, etc.). In fact, when we read The Sun Also Rises for one of my classes, my professor said that he was struck when reading it this time that there did not seem to be a phobia (antisemitism, racism, sexism, etc.) that Hemingway did not embrace in this novel.
Some other examples of modernist novels include: Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is probably the most famous and beloved modernist novel, but it is much tamer and less experimental than most modernist novels). I could see Miss Marple thinking that these classic modernist novels make a song and dance about the wrong sort of things (but I think she might have found The Great Gatsby less objectionable than the other three novels because even though the novel is filled with awful people, she might have sympathized with Nick as a young man growing up and learning about both the brighter and darker sides of human nature).
P. Lombard and Griselda, I find your comments fascinating and informative, with much that is new to me. Great stuff. But would it be untoward for me to mention that Miss Marple and Poirot are perhaps the two most cynical characters I know in fiction? They always think the worst, and don't believe anything anyone says, usually with good reason. (I never could read those "modernist" novels, myself.)
Anubis, while MM certainly reiterates that she never believes anybody, it seems more a matter of penetration than seeing the worst. E.g. in one of the Tuesday club stories (I think the last), she doesn't believe Joyce (probably the same person as Joan) when she calls her "Aunt Jane", blushes and says she doesn't know why she did that. Of course she's fibbing - she just got engaged to MM's nephew! But there is nothing wrong in it, on the contrary! Similarily, MM doesn't believe Basil Blake ( in TBITL) and the woman he's living with aren't married (they are married), but again, there is nothing wrong with that - on the contrary, making Dinah admit the marriage enables MM to give her some very good advice. In both these cases, while MM doesn't believe what she is told, what she believes is actually better.
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Some other examples of modernist novels include: Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is probably the most famous and beloved modernist novel, but it is much tamer and less experimental than most modernist novels). I could see Miss Marple thinking that these classic modernist novels make a song and dance about the wrong sort of things (but I think she might have found The Great Gatsby less objectionable than the other three novels because even though the novel is filled with awful people, she might have sympathized with Nick as a young man growing up and learning about both the brighter and darker sides of human nature).