Style and Substance
The book owes much to William Faulkner in the slow, elegant cadence of its storytelling. Its narrative also resembles Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage; a similarity reinforced by the fact that Foote wrote an introduction to an edition of Crane's work some forty years later.
The story illustrates two of Foote's most strongly held convictions: that Nathan Bedford Forrest was the greatest combat commander in the American Civil War, and that Confederate society held the seeds of its own doom.
Read more about this topic: Shiloh (historical Novel)
Famous quotes containing the words style and/or substance:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air,
And more inconstant than the wind, who woos
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And being angered, puffs away from thence,
Turning his side to the dew-dropping south.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)