‘The present splendid brotherhood of fiction writers in England’

Terry Eagleton reviews Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva, translated by Paco Brito Núñez, for the London Review of Books.

Marx is one of the sources of what we now call cultural studies: the single work of fiction to which he devoted most space was the bestselling sensationalist novel The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue. He was also one of the first exponents of the historical study of literature. He championed what he called ‘the present splendid brotherhood of fiction writers in England’, among them Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell and the Brontë sisters, claiming that they revealed more social and political truths than all the moralists and politicians put together; but like his collaborator and financial backer Friedrich Engels he was wary of literary works that had political designs on the reader. He used the term ‘literature’ to cover all writing of high quality, yet he scorned those who confused the kind of truth appropriate to poetry and fiction with other modes of knowledge. To demand a philosophical system from poets and novelists struck him as absurd. Truth for a writer was not abstract and invariable but unique and specific.

L'Ancora Online (Italy) reviews Disney Pixar's Elemental.

Un incontro-scontro che ricorda molti classici della letteratura, dalla tragedia di William Shakespeare “Romeo e Giulietta” a romanzi come “Orgoglio e pregiudizio” di Jane Austen o “Jane Eyre” di Charlotte Brontë. (Simone Incicco) (Translation)

Condé Nast Traveler describes Estelle Manor, Oxfordshire, as a 'Jane Eyre-esque pile'.