Visions of Imaginatively Sympathetic Power; or, It's All Greek to Me

ELT 42 : 3 1999 In concluding this excellent biography of HC, Allen deals with the essential question of "How ... a man so famous in his own time, so enormously popular and successful as a writer, has been for so long almost totally forgotten?" The answer, she asserts in her final verdict on HC and his work, may lie in the way he dissipated his creative energies. He wanted to be teacher, preacher, writer and statesman in one. Had he concentrated on story-telling, instead of spending so much time on politics and newspaper articles , he might have produced... work to compare with the best of his time or even his idol, Dickens. . . . Dickens's characters are mostly diamond-class: Caine's are frequently fuzzy at the edges and too often the same—as are his plots.... The essential difference between them lies in his one fatal flaw: he was entirely lacking in a sense of humour... in Caine's books all was deadly earnest. He took himself and writing with intense seriousness. His stories can be riveting, passionately romantic or sad... but he almost never makes us laugh. It is an omission posterity has found it hard to forgive. Vivien Allen certainly deserves high marks for this no-nonsense biographical study of HC. She is objective and candid in crystal clear prose which provides a fine example of how biography can (and should) be researched and written. Her work is enriched by excellent photographs and illustrations, by three pertinent appendices which offer an important commentary on HCs correspondence with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a compilation and chronology of HCs literary productions and the "Caine Family Tree," and by a bibliography of the sources Allen used in her research. There is also a very useful index. This book was a pleasure to read. ). O. Baylen, Emeritus ------------------------------ Eastbourne, England Visions of Imaginatively Sympathetic Power; or, It's All Greek to Me Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath. Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom. New York: The Free Press, 1998. xxiii + 277 pp. $25.00 Avrom Fleishman. The Condition of English: Literary Studies in a Changing Culture. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998. xiv + 148 pp. $55.00 "THERE IS LITTLE CONNECTION between literary theory as practiced today and the traditional subject matter of theoretical criticism since Aristotle's Poetics," writes Avrom Fleishman in a chapter considering the changes in his own department over the past thirty years. 330 BOOK REVIEWS Fleishman is not entirely happy that questions about poetic merit or aesthetic value have now been exchanged for the provocations of fashionable lines of argument or the reputations of individual careers, though he is wary about suggesting that too much has been lost. Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, on the other hand, are not at all wary. What has been lost is perfectly represented by Aristotle's Poetics, to be read preferably in the original Greek, along with Homer and the whole classical canon, which is the foundation of literary study, much less Western civilization. Not the least of the reasons why it is fascinating to consider these two books in conjunction with each other is because the one strives carefully to avoid stating what the other is only too pleased to keep repeating. The profession (whether English or classical literature) has become vitiated by theory as well as hopelessly politicized—just for starters. Hanson and Heath can be great fun to read. Not for them any nonsense about multiculturalism. And only so much nonsense about "postcolonialism ." Consider the following passage: It is not reductionist or fantastic to ask why it is that even the most vociferous academic critic of the West would prefer to fly Swiss-air, check into the Mayo clinic, scream obscenities in Times Square, run a red light in Omaha, swim with his girlfriend on Santa Cruz beach, or live next to a U.S. Army base in Texas—rather than board a Congolese airliner, leave his appendix in Managua General, use Allah's name in vain in downtown Jeddah, jump the curb in Singapore, wear a bikini and Speedos in Iran, or vacation near the home of the Korean national Guard...