Dangerous Pilgrimages

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Bradbury, an English novelist who seems to have spent a lifetime studying and enjoying what he calls trans-Atlantic fiction, shows how, from almost the very beginning of American literature, British and American novelists have influenced each other's work more than they might care to admit. And the influence has come not from aping style but from the myths traded back and forth about each other. Washington Irving, for example, spent much of his writing career abroad and, in his Sketch Book, created not only Rip Van Winkle but also cozy essays that established the American view of Merrie Olde England that exists even today. Dickens crossed the Atlantic in search of Utopia, and the reality he found, Bradbury says, made him a better writer. Among the other Americans Bradbury covers in detail are Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and James Baldwin. The Europeans include Trollope, Thackeray, Kipling, Waugh, Lawrence and such non-Brits as Chateaubriand and Nabokov. Also included are some autobiographical memories of Bradbury's own post-WWII adventures at the University of Indiana. The scholarship and critical observations throughout are impressive, but Bradbury's engaging personality is what makes the book a special pleasure. This is literary history at its best. (Aug.)

Library Journal

Bradbury (American studies, Univ. of East Anglia), the author of numerous works of criticism (e.g., The Modern British Novel, Viking, 1995) examines here the myths Europeans created about America and those Americans created about Europe. Beginning with James Fenimore Cooper and Ren de Chateaubriand, Bradbury examines the fiction of, among many others, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Evelyn Waugh, and Vladimir Nabokov to show what these myths were, how they changed, and how they affected the form of the novel itself. Some readers may object to another study of white malesonly the women Frances Trollope and Gertrude Stein are discussed and African Americans Richard Wright and James Baldwin mentioned brieflybut this American-European symbiosis is significant, and Bradbury does not claim it is all of American culture. His well-written and -researched study seems directed primarily to an academic audience.Judy Mimken, Boise P.L., Id.

Bryce Christensen

Since the days when Captain John Smith returned to London to publish his tales of the wilds of Virginia and the charms of Pocahontas, writers have been plying the Atlantic seaways in search of audiences and material. Himself a perceptive traveler and novelist, Bradbury invites us to sail with him as he retraces the journeys of Washington Irving, heading for the grandeurs of medieval Spain; of Dickens, making the lecture circuit through the mill towns of New England; of Twain, deadpanning his way through Italy; of Wilde, playing the dandy for Colorado miners; of Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, inventing modernism in the cafes of Paris; and of Waugh, marveling at the tastelessness of California cemeteries. But behind the international personalities loom the continental myths: America, land of utopian possibilities; Europe, repository of cultural elegance. What Bradbury does best is to steer us through the ironies, paradoxes, and deceits that his transatlantic personalities have negotiated in wending their way between the myths. A great many readers will want to book passage with this literary helmsman, for he charts a course of imaginative exploration well clear of the rocks of pedantry and jargon.