Thursday, December 10, 2009
Recent Chestertonian Revelation
The Great Dr. Overkamp :) has just reached Chesterton in Modern Literature class...and I realized that rejection of convention (which is what I thought Manalive advocated) is not what Chesterton really wanted...read The Unpardonable Appearance of Colonel Crane for a more moderate, but still unconventional, idea on the subject.
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8 comments:
I'm sorry.... so what does Manalive really advocate? Isn't it a sort of freshness of perspective?
Where does one find The Unpardonable Appearance to Colonel Crane?
The Unpardonable Appearance of Colonel Crane is part of Tales of the Long Bow, which Dr. Overkamp says is very rare. I'll ask her if she has a computerized copy that I can post a link to.
Manalive definitely advocates freshness of perspective. Innocent Smith throws in a lot of unconventionality in there. It helps get his point across.
The problem with making the virtues of Unconventionality as such a theme of Manalive is that The Unpardonable Appearance of Colonel Crane explicitly does not advocate wholesale unconventionality. The real Chestertonian position has got to be a bit more subtle than wholesale unconventionality. I have an interpretation, but if you want it without reading the Tales of the Long Bow excerpt...well I will have a Tale of a Long Post.
You will be pleased to learn that TOTLB was reprinted as part of CW8, available from the ACS.
I just checked, and it is not yet available from Dover, who has recently reprinted much of GKC's fiction. If there is another reprint source, please let us know!
Dr. Overkamp did send me an electronic copy of the Unpardonable Appearance, which I could post on this blog if you want. It was published in 1923 ...I think, so there shouldn't be any copyright issues with that.
I'd love to read it if you can get it to me somehow. I heard that 1922 was the cutoff year for public domain, but I don't know that much about it. Maybe you can email it to me if you're worried about a public post; I feel safe going through Alex Drozda. (BTW, he says you're really smart. ;)
I don't really want to buy it, I guess.... :) Someday, when I have my own house and a job, I will buy the whole Chesterton library... for now I'll just stock up on Dover and Librivox recordings. Lol!
Here's a spreadsheet from a legal firm on public domain laws; I found the link on Librivox. http://www.sunsteinlaw.com/practices/copyright-portfolio-development/flowchart.htm It looks like TOTLB depends on whether "the copyright registration was renewed in a year preceding the 28th anniversary of publication." We might be stuck; I have no idea how to find that out.
Never mind! *goofy grin while shaking head at self* Silly Laura, just google it!
http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Tales_of_the_Long_Bow/Chapter_I
You can find "Tales of the Long Bow" in volume eight of The Collected works of G. K. Chesterton. I read it, and loved it!
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