{"id":190942,"date":"2018-11-24T02:30:12","date_gmt":"2018-11-24T07:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=190942"},"modified":"2018-11-24T02:30:12","modified_gmt":"2018-11-24T07:30:12","slug":"a-look-at-the-books-which-have-inspired-literary-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/11\/24\/a-look-at-the-books-which-have-inspired-literary-classics\/","title":{"rendered":"A look at the books which have inspired literary classics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The \u201cmicro-learning\u201d app and platform blinkist.com has been compiling literary sources for such classics as \u201cA Clockwork Orange,\u201d \u201cOliver Twist\u201d and \u201c1984.\u201d (File Photo<\/a>: Blinkist\/Facebook<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NEW YORK \u2014 Behind every great book are the books which influenced it.<\/p>\n

The \u201cmicro-learning\u201d app and platform blinkist.com has been compiling literary sources for such classics as \u201cA Clockwork Orange,\u201d \u201cOliver Twist\u201d and \u201c1984.\u201d Mary Shelley’s \u201cFrankenstein\u201d was inspired by each of her parents \u2014 William Godwin’s \u201cAn Enquiry Concerning Political Justice\u201d and Mary Wollstonecraft’s \u201cA Vindication of the Rights of Women.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the defining novels of the Civil War era, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s \u201cUncle Tom’s Cabin,\u201d drew in part upon one of the defining memoirs, \u201cThe Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.\u201d Douglass’ book, which remains standard reading in many schools, also was cited by Toni Morrison for her Pulitzer Prize winning historical novel \u201cBeloved.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were noticing the attention around the 200th anniversary of ‘Frankenstein’ and got to thinking about the nonfiction works which help author of fiction,\u201d says Blinkist writer-editor Tom Anderson. \u201cWe think of those books as the unsung heroes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charles Dickens’ portrait of extreme wealth and poverty in London in \u201cOliver Twist\u201d was in part modeled on Edward Gibbon’s \u201cThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.\u201d Anthony Burgess drew upon fiction and nonfiction for his terrifying \u201cA Clockwork Orange,\u201d his sources including Aldous Huxley’s futuristic classic \u201cBrave New World\u201d and B.F. Skinner’s landmark of psychology \u201cScience and Human Behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tolstoy’s \u201cWar and Peace\u201d reflected the author’s reading of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, along with works about Napoleon and French history. According to Tolstoy scholar Ani Kokobobo, the author was \u201ccaptivated\u201d by Schopenhauer and his belief that \u201cdeath is the only reality,\u201d a viewpoint expressed by the cerebral Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky in \u201cWar and Peace.\u201d Kokobobo also noted that \u201cWar and Peace\u201d was a response in part to such French scholarship as Adolphe Thiers’ \u201cHistory of the Consulate and the Empire of France Under Napoleon,\u201d which Tolstoy believed exaggerated Napoleon’s stature and military ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cTolstoy did not believe in this ‘great man’ theory, also propagated by Thomas Carlyle, and thought that victory and defeat were not determined by a sole heroic leader, but rather by the collective alignment of the will of thousands,\u201d said Kokobobo, editor of the Tolstoy Studies Journal.<\/p>\n

George Orwell’s 1984, the Dystopian political novel which has become a bestseller again during the Trump administration, reflects in part the British author’s reading of two nonfiction studies: James Burnham’s \u201cThe Managerial Revolution\u201d and Halford Mackinder’s \u201cDemocratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a recent telephone interview, Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, said his father was \u201cthe most voracious reader\u201d who \u201cabsorbed enormous amounts of books.\u201d Orwell Society committee member Les Hurst said that \u201c1984\u201d shows how Orwell adapted the ideas of others to his own. He noted a passage from the Mackinder book, which came out just after World War I: \u201cWho rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.\u201d Orwell borrowed Mackinder’s framing for one of the most famous epigrams from \u201c1984\u201d: \u201cWho controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Mackinder book sat in Orwell’s mind for several years,\u201d Hurst said. \u201cOrwell was able to translate those words, able to extend Burnham’s concepts of power and power worship and to take ideals of geopolitics and perform this great imaginative leap, from geography and cast into the past and into the future. He takes something with two dimensions and turned it into something that is three dimensional.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 Behind every great book are the books which influenced it. The \u201cmicro-learning\u201d app and platform blinkist.com has …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":190943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","mauthors-hillel-italie","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}