The Reading Room - 2017-12-06

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1:44 AM

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Q: "It might be for years, and it might be for ever," - What is the original novel this quote appeared in?

There are many novels of the same period that have this quote in them based on my perusal through the Internet Archive but could anyone please tell me what the original source of the quote was? Thanks. It seems to have been a popular quote as so many 19th-century novels use it.

history-of-literature quote-identification

4 hours later…

5:17 AM

@DVK-on-Ahch-To it's a question about the influences behind Strugatskys' Definitely maybe

6 hours later…

Christophe Strobbe

11:22 AM

@Riker No more untagged questions now :-)

Oh, and winter bash starts one week from now!

5 hours later…

4:11 PM

@Randal'Thor was reading transcript, confused me when the wikipedia art for Atlas Shrugged mentioned it as "Rand's most expressive statement" :p

> Atlas Shrugged includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance, and it contains Rand's most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction.

4:25 PM

@Riker That's basically how I know about Ayn Rand, from false positives when searching for myself :-P

lol

6

Q: Did Rand think that people in the real world were that stupid?

Atlas Shrugged is a novel that was written for the purpose of expressing Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism. Generally speaking, barring those setbacks placed in their way by non-Objectivists, the Objectivist characters of Rand's books ultimately accomplish great things and live happy lives. The ...

atlas-shrugged ayn-rand

Pretty sure I have a deleted funny comment on this ^

4:37 PM

> *waiting for Rand al'Thor to say something* - Mithrandir

> @Mithrandir Everyone is stupid. - Rand al'Thor

Huh. Nothing funnier than that?

I'm disappointed in myself.

Napoleon Wilson

5:10 PM

Wait, Ayn Rand is a woman?

Sure she is.

@Randal'Thor yeah. It wasn't funny, so I deleted it ;)

5:21 PM

suspended for not being funny enough

4 hours later…

8:56 PM

0

Q: How many manuscripts of English Renaissance plays have survived?

During the English renaissance, plays were primarily written for performance and play manuscripts were usually not sold to a printer before the play had had a successful run in the theatre. A number of plays have survived in manuscript form, e.g. John Bale's King Johan (rediscovered in the 1830s)...

history-of-literature physical-books english-renaissance-theater

9:26 PM

@Riker There's more suggested edits for you to review, if you're around.

im alive

... I'm not getting them

it says a little red thing but nothing there

caching /shrug

xkcd is boring. Today's story is much better told by Stanisław Lem.

2

Yeah, I don't see anything in the queue either.

@Riker You should be able to get them from the /history page, if they aren't loading in /review itself.

Oh, now a few loaded.

9:31 PM

mith got it

And I disagree about that circular tag definition - having a description for a relatively obscure term like that is helpful IMO

@Mithrandir You literally just said in another room that wiki excerpts without usage guidance should be rejected ...

in SFF community cleanup room, 2 hours ago, by Mithrandir

But does it need a tag wiki except then? Seems like a use of the 'circular tag definition' reason...

There's a difference between Winnie the Pooh and literary terms....

While most people will know what Winnie the Pooh is, I don't expect most people to know what an epistolary novel is.

Defining what the tag is is useful in cases where it's not obvious from the name.

I'd say this falls under that.

Wait, lemme check that review again.

I don't think it's even a very good definition of an epistolary novel - it says they're "typically" written as a series of letters, but also mentions at the end that they might be made up of all sorts of other things.

And the list of examples doesn't really come under "defining what the tag is".

And it's not just a definition to go along with usage guidance; there's no usage guidance.

Do we use that tag on all questions about individual epistolary novels, or only on questions about the genre as a whole?

@Randal'Thor if something is usually one thing but can also be something else, you don't think that saying that is useful information?

9:43 PM

@Mithrandir It might be useful information, but it's not a good definition.

@Randal'Thor I don't think that's clear yet - there are two contradictory examples tagged with it - so defining usage when there is no defined usage at this point isn't helpful.

(I had no idea there was a name for this until about ten minutes ago, to be perfectly honest.)

(Also, those are curious examples to choose, given that there are far more famous epistolary novels.)

(Like Dracula. And Frankenstein.)

The examples aren't very useful, IMO - might just remove them.

The definition is far more helpful, even if it could have been worded better.

I see you've removed the tag from a question. shrugs Whatever.

@Mithrandir According to our general policy on using medium tags only for short works, e.g. short-stories and poetry but not novel or theater.

Our dracula questions haven't used the epistolary tag, so why should an ella-minnow-pea question?

But is it a medium tag or is it more akin to ergodicity?

9:53 PM

I also edited the wiki excerpt - more constructive than faffing about in chat :-) Better?

@Randal'Thor not bad ;)

@Randal'Thor probably because, as @BESW would say, we haven't given them the chance to.

Napoleon Wilson

Wut? Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus is an epistolary novel?

@NapoleonWilson According to Wikipedia, yes.

(I haven't read the original, only a retelling <shame>)

Yeah, it's written in either letters or diary entries, don't remember which

Napoleon Wilson

Isn't it just some dude telling the story from first person inside a rather shallow frame story?

9:56 PM

Been a long time since I read it ;P

Napoleon Wilson

It's not at all, unless I'm going crazy.

I just went through a bunch of pages to make sure, but it doesn't make any sense with my experience either. He doesn't read a diary to the people he's telling the story. And such intimate secrets as he shares don't make sense in letters either.

I see a lot of letters

Napoleon Wilson

I see a lot of letters, too. But that's books for ya. ;-P

Start of chapter 6, for instance

And 7

Napoleon Wilson

Hmm, there's a letter, true.

10:01 PM

And it definitely opens with 'letter 1' etc

Napoleon Wilson

The majority of the story is his accounts of what happened to him told to the ship's captain, though.

@Mithrandir Oh, the ones from the captain?

Hmm, I guess it contains more letters than I remembered. And it mixes other retellings into the primary retelling, too, like the creature's accounts of his adventures.

user image

user15026

@NapoleonWilson Yep.

Napoleon Wilson

I guess that can graciously be interpreted as "epistolary". I still maintain that the majority of the narration is oral tradition, though. But maybe that counts as "epistolary", too.

user15026

(I covered it in some course relating to epistolary works in my English degree)

user15026

10:06 PM

@NapoleonWilson A wider definition involves anything that could be construed as "documentation" - transcripted conversation, letters, blogs, emails, etc.

@Ash (does this look OK to you as a definition?)

Napoleon Wilson

@Ash Hmm, okay then. Makes more sense now.

user15026

@Randal'Thor Yeah, it looks pretty good

10:30 PM

@NapoleonWilson The entire novel is framed, by the prologue, as a series of letters sent by a ship's Captain to his sister, in which he describes being really bored so he's going to tell her the rambling story he heard from a guy they found on the ice.

Everything else in the novel is presented as part of those letters.

@Mithrandir I wouldn't say it's a medium tag; I think it's only useful as a tag where the epistolary nature of the text is central to the question.

11:18 PM

I don't even use Goodreads (at all) ... how does it know to give me a sidebar ad for A Memory of Light?

Scary.

steelersquirrel

11:52 PM

Ohhhhh...you guys got a question about ~~William Shakespeare~~ The 17th Earl of Oxford! ;)

@steelersquirrel Funny you should say that ... I'm just now writing up a new william-shakespeare question :-)

steelersquirrel

Are you a believer of the Oxfordian theory?

I actually came over here to look at some American Psycho question that I was supposed to look at before and I forgot ;)

@steelersquirrel I don't know enough about any of these theories really.

What's the evidence that the plays weren't really written by William Shakespeare?

Or conversely, what's the evidence that the man from Stratford did write all those plays?

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