Re: Classics and Contemporaries: Some Notes on Horror Fiction - S.T. Joshi
Posted by:
gesturestear (IP Logged)
Date: 23 December, 2012 01:52PM
Writers today have so many oppurtunities availble to themwith the advent of the internet. Anyone can create an online blog, outsource their matrtial to numerous webzines, from critical film, sport,book and travel online sources and investment (The Motely fool). Social websites like Youtube,Facebook,blogs, I could go on and on, all a writer needs is some attention from one of these numerous online sources to give them their, "15 minutes".
The invention of the steam-powered printing press in the 1850's? allowed writers to publish material on a Industrial scale. This was the beginning of the information age, a mere drop in the bucket compared to current technology. Writers could now dream of reaping the benifets of their gift, instead of waiting to immortalized after death, like so many unknown authors before. Now the power of WORD was out of the Churches grasp, who controlled all printing before, with monks, block lettering and expensive binding, ink and parchment. This lead to severe censorship and writers were now looked down upon as threats to political and social dogma. Writers had to appease only their publisher who were forced to look to the writer as a number,or dollar sign, units sold and political, social,and religous pressures who held the money and owned the factories. Writers like Poe lived from one story to the next and msny became paranoid and nuerotic. The circumstances surronding Poe's death are still unknown. A great fictional auto biography of Poe is writer, Matthrw Pearl's "The Poe Shadow".
I will end with one example, I used before Nikolia Gogol, a Russian writer in the early mid
18th century. Very few writers have been documented to go through so much madness and illness just to finish his sequel to the Russian satire novel "Dead
Souls". His previous work wrote about vengeance of the common man against society norms. Wanting to make his work an art of protection he traveled to Italy and France. He finally drove himself mad and sick from fatigue. Confessing to Russian preist about his p
unfinished manuscript and confessing his homosexualality, he was ordered to burn the manuscript and starve himself for 5 days. This destroyed any will to live and he died a
painfull death.
He was buried in a church cemetary and his grave was ordered to be. moved, his corpse was found lying face down, another source of indignity. A statue was built upon his gravesite and then destroyed and replaced with a statue of the Czar.
So yes I think writers today have it so much easier than those before them. These horrors and tribulations of history's forgotten writers.must be ressurected and not forgotten, which is a reason I joined this site.
I wrote this on my smart phone and the cursor jumps around and erases previous material but I have tried to correct myself. I do not propose to be a historical accurate event of all the above material, the reader can take what he wants.
Thank you.
ternet writers had to appease publishers, Weird Fiction, Readers
Digest.