Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of… the 1890's, pt.2 (1895-1899)

Feels like most of what I associate with 19th century lit shows up in the last five years!

Interesting bc the last five years are the only five years where Mudie's Circulating Library was not controlling the form and content of books published in England.

Not sure which to vote for but The Gadfly is the most batshit insane book I've ever read.

Suspecting I’ll be the only vote for Treasure Seekers.

I love E. Nesbit but I'm not a huge fan of the Bastables.

But seriously, you guys, The Gadfly! The Gadfly is what you get when you really really want to write a book about a man having an affair with a priest but you live in the Victorian era, so you try to disguise it but your way of disguising it somehow makes it 1000x more fucked up.

xxxp Either way I hope you keep going, it's been fun. Year-by-year could be interesting.

I'll have to read The Gadfly I guess

Year-by-year is a pretty epic undertaking! I'll keep voting, either way.

Despite it falling off a cliff fairly spectacularly in the second half, the first chunk of Dracula is great enough that I'm tempted to vote for that.

the other best-selling horror novel of that year, The Beetle, is not very good but it exceeds Dracula in wtfness

an extraordinary run for Wells in this period

I'm not sure Heart of Darkness is long enough to be considered a novel, but I voted for it

Fuck Dracula and its orientalist bullshit.

Voting Heart of Darkness for its colonist bullshit instead.

Gide's Paludes should've been included. It's the most idiosyncratic and forward-looking of his novels, pomo avant la lettre.

*colonialist

xp

Fuck Dracula and its orientalist bullshit.

Haha, you're certainly the person on ILX best placed to call this particular work out on its bullshit.

I caught a film called Lady From Lisbon on Talking Pictures TV the other day and, after the outdated racial attitudes warning at the begining, was quite disappointed that there wasn't much anti-Portuguese bigotry to get upset over :(

Orientalism concerns aside, first half of Dracula is terrific, first as a travelogue (the descriptions of the food always grabbed me) then the scenes in the castle, which have endured in popular culture for very good reasons, problematic as they are.
Then the second half is such a fucking bore, all the characters are unimaginably dull, like Quincy's whole character is "he's American" and the squeamish repulsion to sex gets old very fast.

I kinda like the sound of this.

Horror critic R. S. Hadji placed The Sorrows of Satan at number one in his list of the worst horror novels ever written.[2]

Brian Stableford, discussing Corelli's "narcissistic" novels, described The Sorrows of Satan thus: "as delusions of grandeur and expressions of devout wish-fulfilment go, the fascination of the Devil was an unsurpassable masterstroke".[1]

I'm hamming it up tbh – your assessment is totally fair, and I'm especially thankful for the cross-media adaptations it has yielded, starting with Murnau's Nosferatu and Herzog's own subsequent rewriting. I mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_L2654ai4o

Besides, Romania's own Tourism Authority has been banking on this crap for decades by stressing the apocryphal connection between Vlad Țepeș and Bran Castle in particular.

xp

as delusions of grandeur and expressions of devout wish-fulfilment go, the fascination of the Devil was an unsurpassable masterstroke

Intriguing indeed. I wonder if the title is a callback to Goethe.

Dracula is a slog.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Have read just a handful, Conrad's HoD easily. But I have seen a film version of Almayer's Folly by Chantal Akerman.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.