Authors on Writing
Insights and advice from renowned authors on the craft of writing.
Samuel Johnson's Great Task
Beyond mere moralism, Samuel Johnson’s critical project sought to tame the modern novel. This article explores how Johnson championed universal truths and the writer’s public duty as a bulwark against the rise of private, individual experience in 18th-century fiction, aiming to transform a potentially dangerous new medium into an instrument of public virtue.
Sterne and the Associative Mind
Using John Locke’s philosophy as a framework, this article analyzes Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy not as mere formal eccentricity, but as a sophisticated critique of linear autobiography. Sterne’s digressive, conversational style models the chaotic, associative nature of consciousness to challenge the very possibility of a stable self in the Age of Reason.
Tolstoy's War Against Art
Exploring the core contradiction in Leo Tolstoy’s work, this article examines how the creator of the world’s most complex realist novels later waged a war against aestheticism itself. It argues that his late-career philosophy in What is Art? was not a rejection of his masterpieces but a desperate attempt to subordinate their sprawling, ‘fox-like’ genius to a single, ‘hedgehog-like’ moral truth.