Criticism
Eckert has sparked controversy with his "hidden dialogue" technique in his historical narratives, using a novelist's technique to enhance dramatic events. After many years of research on a topic, he has felt free to recreate historical conversations and thoughts in what some critics have considered to be "an entertaining blend of fact and fiction" purporting to be a straight biography. His colorful evocations of history have been praised as more accessible than drier, more strictly factual, accounts. However, what he has termed “narrative biography” has been criticized as “an apparent euphemism for poetic license”. A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh in particular has been faulted as “A biography that succeeds better as fiction” which “in its interpretative zeal … strays from … the historical record to the point of being suspect”.
Read more about this topic: Allan W. Eckert
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
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“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
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“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)