Literary Significance and Criticism
Upon publication, Angle of Repose was praised nearly unanimously by critics for being both "...the most ambitious and deeply realized of works" and on a larger scale, "...a major piece of literature". While some felt that Stegner did not make the meaning of Susan Burling Ward's story clear enough to Lyman Ward, most critics agreed that the characters, plot, and historical setting of Angle of Repose are well-realized. Even the slightly delayed review from the New York Times (most newspapers reviewed the book in April while the Times reviewed it in August) was just short of entirely positive, with the reviewer praising the novel with the reservation that "...I reached page 569 convinced that an essential element was absent". Despite this missing "element", most critics agree that Angle of Repose is "...one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century..."
The reputation of Angle of Repose remains strong among critics as well as readers. In 1999, readers of the San Francisco Chronicle voted it the best 20th-century novel written about the western United States.
Read more about this topic: Angle Of Repose (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination.... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)