What text has been read clearer by modern readers?

March 19, 2019 2:14 PM

I'm looking for examples of writers who were better understood by later readers than their contemporaries. Of course, this is needfully subjective, but I'd like to know what folks you might reasonably imagine smiling (like, if they were a ghost) that their truth had finally been read and understood in their written lines by subsequent generations of readers.

And I'd love linguistic, historical, societal arguments that this or that person would be happier with how their read now than contemporaneously, or even for those who were found, lost, then found again. Perhaps, this could also be extended to folks who are better understood now, but might not be happier for their reception.

posted by es_de_bah to Writing & Language (19 answers total)

So, you're probably going to need to read about Leo Strauss.
posted by praemunire at 2:20 PM on March 19, 2019 [6 favorites]

Maybe Alfred Wegener on continental drift. Although, his critics were right that he didn't have a plausible mechanism (he had continents drifting over top of the ocean crust instead of them moving togther as part of tectonic plates).
posted by wps98 at 2:32 PM on March 19, 2019

Although he did have a following in his lifetime, Walt Whitman is an example of this. And Moby Dick was a complete failure until a 20th century critic whose name escapes me at the moment started writing about it.
posted by Orlop at 2:32 PM on March 19, 2019 [8 favorites]

Whitman might well be happier with his reading today, as he did a fair bit of self-censoring. Galway Kinnell’s Essential Whitman, for instance, includes the manuscript version of (again, IIRC) “A Woman Waits For Me,” an erotic poem that was originally written about a male lover.
posted by Orlop at 2:38 PM on March 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

Orlop, ditto Gerard Manley Hopkins and I think readings of Dickinson have also gotten better.

Many nineteenth-century women writers have been reanalyzed in light of their political and social importance. Nina Baym is a great gateway to their reassessment.
posted by mmmbacon at 2:56 PM on March 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

Wuthering Heights is a good example, as the nineteenth-century response to it was pretty much WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS I CANNOT EVEN. Even when Emily Bronte came into her own as a major author in the last quarter or so of the nineteenth century, it was as a poet, not a novelist.
posted by thomas j wise at 3:22 PM on March 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

If we are talking non-fiction, surely Darwin who was mocked for saying we descended from apes (he didn't)
If we are talking fiction, many great writers who are now accepted as greats were scorned in their lifetime - Joyce is the obvious example
posted by TheRaven at 3:24 PM on March 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

William Blake was scorned and laughed at by the few members of the contemporary literary and artistic establishments who deigned to acknowledge his existence, and is now considered the greatest English poet of his age as well as the most interesting visual artist. Too bad almost all the music he produced was lost.
posted by jamjam at 3:24 PM on March 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

If you're interested in writers who are not dead white men but instead dead black women, Zora Neale Hurston is the milk carton example of this. There is an absolute ton of academic writing on why she was largely ignored when she was alive, both examining her gender and examining her race. Alice Walker revived her.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:51 PM on March 19, 2019 [15 favorites]

In his lifetime, Karl Marx was a minor philosopher and journalist, argumentative and constantly in debt, and who was mostly known for criticising other, more prominent intellectuals and revolutionaries. I cannot imagine the ghost of Marx smiling at his 20thC legacy.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:58 PM on March 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think Marlowe would be very happy with the ways Edward II is staged nowadays-- things like Derek Jarman's radically political film version seem to me extremely Marlovian.
posted by Rush-That-Speaks at 4:14 PM on March 19, 2019

For lesser known but more modern examples: Fran Ross, who wrote Oreo in I want to say the 70s? It’s the story of a biracial girl (and the extended families who produced her) and her journey to get revenge upon the father who abandoned her. Ross was, at one point, a writer for Richard Pryor, but she is also so much more than that. I mean, funny as hell, but also...just read it, really. She plays with identity and humor and race and gender in ways that read as pyrotechnic now, so the 70s (possibly early 80s?) were just not ready. An academic and poet out in California championed a reprint of Oreo in the mid-2000s and it has since become a cult classic.

Anyway. It’s a tour de force, and no one appeared to get it at the time.
posted by schadenfrau at 6:17 PM on March 19, 2019 [4 favorites]

I think there was a period of "classical" education that treated its literary canon as great and important artifacts to be understood as foundational, etc., etc.. I suspect postmodern translators and performers who reach deep into the text and subtext for the drama and fun are probably closer to the original context than the classics prigs who taught Homer and Shakespeare as a class marker.

At the very least post-modern interpretations understand that one of the few true universal fundamentals of culture is that many people appreciate a good fart joke.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:55 PM on March 19, 2019 [3 favorites]

Omar Khayyam's Ruba’iyyat. Persians generally took him as a Sufi, which isn't quite right; though the 19th century British didn't get him right either, they certainly got his existential dilemmas in a way that the very religious did not.

Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism". Kind of absurd for 1891; extremely relevant for 2019.
posted by zompist at 11:07 PM on March 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

De Rarum Natura of Lucretius fit the bill? Or is it too old?
posted by indianbadger1 at 12:36 PM on March 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I'd just like to pop in and thank everybody who's answered so far. You guys are the best.
posted by es_de_bah at 3:35 PM on March 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm stunned that no one has mentioned John Kennedy Toole, the novelist behind the hilarious A Confederacy of Dunces. He tried so hard to publish and was repeatedly rejected. He killed himself at 31 years old, and his mother went on to keep working at getting it published, finally achieving her goal in 1980, eleven years after his death. In 1981 it won a Pulitzer Prize. It's brilliant and never seems to become irrelevant.
posted by gloriouslyincandescent at 9:00 PM on March 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

Jean Genet would be my pick as a pioneer of queer sensibilities.
posted by Middlemarch at 3:58 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

The Madwoman in the Attic revealed a lot of messages and themes in c19 women's fiction, which were seemingly hidden, consciously or unconsciously, by the author during publication and a long time after. In Jane Eyre for example, the suggestion that Jane and Bertha are in some way doubles of each other gives a whole new understanding of the book, and when you read it in this light it is SOO obvious (Bertha being violent when Jane is agitated etc) but was not picked up on at all.
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 4:32 AM on March 22, 2019