Chesterton

Michael Straight · 05 Aug 1998, 08:16 · from urth-v0017.mbox · original

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Chesterton
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 08:16:07
Message-ID: <urth-v0017-0087 at digest.urth.net>
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On Tue, 4 Aug 1998, adam louis stephanides wrote:

> On a completely different topic, I know that Wolfe admires Chesterton, but
> Chesterton has never seemed "Wolfeian" to me, to employ a Borgesian
> temporal inversion.  But in THE COLLECTED WORKS OF G. K. CHESTERTON vol.
> 14, which contains hundreds of pages of unpublished short stories,
> novelettes, and fragments, there is a short story, "Child Street," which
> did strike me as very Wolfeian. It's an excellent story, and worth seeking
> out in a library or through interlibrary loan.  (The samw volume contains
> another excellent unpublished short story, "Le Jongleur de Dieu," which is
> not particularly Wolfeian, but is strikingly un-Chestertonian.)

I've always thought "The Man Who Was Thursday" was a bit Wolfean (albeit
less subtle than Wolfe) in it's attempts at deliberately misdirecting the
reader, and perhaps also in the really weird twist everything takes at the
end.

-Rostrum


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