{"id":13223,"date":"2010-08-13T11:27:10","date_gmt":"2010-08-13T18:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2010\/08\/13\/13223.html"},"modified":"2010-08-13T11:27:10","modified_gmt":"2010-08-13T18:27:10","slug":"classic-books-that-criticize-p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2010\/08\/13\/classic-books-that-criticize-p\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic works that criticize popular books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I've been reading <cite>Don Quixote<\/cite> in fits and starts, and just got to the scene in chapter 6 where Quixote's friends toss all his books of chivalry into the yard to be burned.<\/p>\n<p>And it occurs to me that, although the scene is funny, it invites the reader to sympathize with book-burners and to rail against pop culture, two things that I'm a little reluctant to do.<\/p>\n<p>(I'm imagining the modern equivalent might be a scene in which a vampire-LARPer's friends decide to burn his whole collection of vampire books, with droll commentary on each one as they consign it to the flames.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, it also brought to mind <cite>Northanger Abbey<\/cite>, which I can't believe I've never written an actual entry about. No time to do so now; short version is that it's my second-favorite Austen novel, after <cite>P&amp;P<\/cite>. And it's all about the dangers of reading too much popular fiction. One of the things I like about it is how much fun it has with that idea; Catherine seems to me to be recognizably a Fan, and the book seemed to me an excellent portrayal of early Fandom.<\/p>\n<p>So now I'm wondering: what other well-known now-classic books took as a main theme the criticism of popular fiction and its readers?<\/p>\n<p><cite>The Rivals<\/cite> has some of that, though iIrc it's a little bit less the main idea than in <cite>Quixote<\/cite> and <cite>Northanger Abbey<\/cite>. (But it's been a long time since I saw or read that play, so I could be wrong.)<\/p>\n<p>Not thinking of others offhand, but I'm sure they exist. Anyone?<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading Don Quixote in fits and starts, and just got to the scene in chapter 6 where Quixote&#8217;s&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}