The Blood Oranges (novel)

Last updated
The Blood Oranges
Author John Hawkes
LanguageEnglish
Media typePrint (Hardback)

The Blood Oranges is a 1971 novel by American writer John Hawkes. The novel belongs to a triad, along with Death, Sleep, & the Traveler and Travesty. [1] The novel takes place in a fictionalized version of Illyria. [2] [3]

Webster Schott, writing in Life , referred to the novel as "...poetry passing as fiction, intellectualism doubling as sex daydream." [4]

Related Research Articles

In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood, in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung ("education") and Roman ("novel").

Illyria Historical region in Western Balkan, Southeast Europe

In classical antiquity, Illyria was a region in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula inhabited by numerous tribes of people collectively known as the Illyrians. Illyrians spoke the Illyrian language, an Indo-European language, which in ancient times perhaps also had speakers in some parts of Southern Italy. The geographical term Illyris was sometimes used to define approximately the area of northern and central Albania down to the Aoös valley, including in most periods much of the lakeland area. In Roman times the terms Illyria / Illyris / Illyricum were extended from the territory that was roughly located in the area of the south-eastern Adriatic coast and its hinterland, to a broader region stretching between the Adriatic Sea and the Danube, and from the upper reaches of the Adriatic down to the Ardiaei. From about mid 1st century BC the term Illyricum was used by the Romans for the province of the Empire that stretched along the eastern Adriatic coast north of the Drin river, south of which the Roman province of Macedonia began.

Willa Cather American writer (1873–1947)

Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I.

Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasises its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the audience to be aware they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.

<i>A Journal of the Plague Year</i> 1722 novel by Daniel Defoe

A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials, Of the most Remarkable Occurrences, As well Publick as Private, which happened in London During the last Great Visitation In 1665, commonly called A Journal of the Plague Year is a book by Daniel Defoe, first published in March 1722. It is an account of one man's experiences of the year 1665, in which the bubonic plague struck the city of London in what became known as the Great Plague of London, the last epidemic of plague in that city. The book is told somewhat chronologically, though without sections or chapter headings, and with frequent digressions and repetitions.

<i>Riddley Walker</i> 1980 novel by Russell Hoban

Riddley Walker (1980) is a science fiction novel by Russell Hoban, first published in 1980. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel in 1982, as well as an Australian Science Fiction Achievement Award in 1983. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1981.

Great American Novel Canonical novel that is thought to embody the essence of America

The Great American Novel is a canonical novel that is thought to embody the essence of America, generally written by an American and dealing in some way with the question of America's national character. The term was coined by John William De Forest in an 1868 essay. Although De Forest mentioned Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe as a possible contender, he noted that the Great American Novel had most likely not been written yet. Writer Henry James used the shortened term, GAN, in 1880.

John Hawkes, born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr., was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended some traditional constraints of narrative fiction.

<i>A Fable</i> Novel of WW1 trenches, Pulitzer Prize 1955

A Fable is a 1954 novel written by the American author William Faulkner. He spent more than a decade and tremendous effort on it, and aspired for it to be "the best work of my life and maybe of my time". It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Historically, it can be seen as a precursor to Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

Bradamante

Bradamante is a fictional knight heroine in two epic poems of the Renaissance: Orlando Innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo and Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. Since the poems exerted a wide influence on later culture, she became a recurring character in Western art.

<i>The Coral Island</i> 1857 novel by R. M. Ballantyne

The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) is a novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck.

Peter Preston Brooks is an American literary theorist who is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He has been Professor in the Department of English and School of Law at the University of Virginia. Among his many accomplishments is the founding of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2003. Brooks is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work cuts across French and English literature, law, and psychoanalysis. He was influenced by fellow Yale scholar, Paul de Man, to whom his book Reading for the Plot is dedicated.

The American Society of Church History (ASCH) was founded in 1888 with the disciplines of Christian denominational and ecclesiastical history as its focus. Today the society's interests include the broad range of the critical scholarly perspectives, as applied to the history of Christianity and its relationship to surrounding cultures in all periods, locations, and contexts. The society was founded by Philip Schaff.

Robert R. Hodges is a professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton.

<i>The Bravo</i>

The Bravo is a novel by James Fenimore Cooper first published in 1831 in two volumes. Inspired by a trip to Europe where he traveled through much of Italy, the novel is set in Venice. The Bravo is the first of Cooper's three novels to be set in Europe. This group of three novels, which one critic would call Cooper's "European trilogy", include The Heidenmauer and The Headsman. Like his other novels set in Europe, The Bravo was not very well received in the United States. The book largely focuses on political themes, especially the tension between the social elite and other classes.

Robert Lee Wolff was a Harvard history professor, known for his 1956 book The Balkans in our time and his library collection of English novels of the Victorian period with over 18,000 items.

Récit is a term for a subgenre of the French novel, describing a work in which the narrative calls attention to itself. Literary critic Roger Shattuck explains, "During a récit, we are conscious of being at one remove from the action; the very act of narration interferes and calls attention to itself." Examples of the récit include works by Benjamin Constant and Eugene Fromentin, André Gide, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Leiris. According to Shattuck,

The discomfort of the narrator in confronting his own effort of composition has been inherited as one of the principal features of the recit.

Taylor Stoehr (1931–2013) was an American professor and author. He edited several volumes of Paul Goodman's work as his literary executor.

Hard Punishments, also sometimes referred to as Cather's Avignon story, is the final, unpublished, and since lost novel by Willa Cather, almost entirely destroyed following her death in 1947.

Kingsley Widmer (1925–2009) was an American literary critic.

References

  1. Rosenzweig, Paul (Winter 1982). "Aesthetics and the Psychology of Control in John Hawkes's Triad". Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 15 (2): 146–162. doi:10.2307/1345221. JSTOR   1345221.
  2. Hawkes, John; Scholes, Robert (1972). "A Conversation on "The Blood Oranges" between John Hawkes and Robert Scholes". Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 5 (3): 203–204, 197–207. doi:10.2307/1345277. JSTOR   1345277.
  3. Schaap, Rosie (22 April 2016). "Raise a Glass to Shakespeare". The New York Times . Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  4. Schott, Webster (8 October 1971). "Philosopher of Sexistentialism". Life . Retrieved 28 July 2020.