Bloom's Modern Critical Views - G. K. Chesterton (2006) (201p) [Inua].pdf

G. K. Chesterton (Bloom's Modern Critical Views) Hardcover – April, 2006
by Harold Bloom (Editor)

Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (April 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791081311
ISBN-13: 978-0791081310

Editor’s Note
My introduction, unhappily ambivalent, celebrates Chesterton’s marvelous fantasy narrative The Man Who Was Thursday, but also surveys the virulent representations of “The Jews” throughout Chesterton’s career.
Hugh Kenner, the late High Priest of what once was called Literary Modernism, exalts Chesterton’s “perceptivity”, which he audaciously compares to the mythmaking faculty of William Blake and of James Joyce.
More realistically, Garry Wills give us a carefully limited defense of Chesterton-as-poet, particularly in The Ballad of the White Horse.
In a careful study of Chestertonian allegory, Lynette Hunter leads us through the work of 1904–1907: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Ball and the Cross, and The Man Who Was Thursday.
John Coats usefully traces the mingled influence of Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo upon Chesterton’s conception of the Grotesque in literature, which Chesterton consciously opposed to the Aestheticism of Walter Pater.
Browning’s version of the Grotesque is shrewdly judged by John Pfordresher to be peculiarly central to Chesterton, who defended it from the attack of Walter Bagehot, while employing John Ruskin as a critical armory in the defense.
The Sublime and Terrible, both allied to the Grotesque, are emphasized in Elmar Schenkel’s account of the Father Brown stories, where Chesterton fights to reconcile his dread of chaos with the Christian arguments for discovering an order in reality.
Orthodoxy, Chesterton’s major idea of order, is analyzed by Ed Block, Jr. as an antidote to nihilism, always a temptation for the tumultuous Chesterton.

Chaucer, Chesterton’s crown as a literary critic, is seen by John McCabe as a celebration of Chaucerian piety, which I find to be a simplification of a critical study that warns us to be wary of Chaucer’s ironies. As Chesterton wisely remarked, they sometimes are too large to be seen.
Marian E. Crowe gracefully reminds us of Chesterton’s esteem for Jane Austen, whose Pride and Prejudice is then read as an allegory of Chestertonian Orthodoxy, reconciling opposites in a creative tension.
In this volume’s splendid final essay, Robert Caserio illuminates The Man Who Was Thursday by contrasting its identification of Modernism and Anarchist-terrorism with similar insights of Don DeLillo in Mao II, and of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. But Caserio adds his own apprehension of Chesterton’s central touch of paradox: terrorism is ultimately sanctioned by the God of orthodoxy, who works his own ends, beyond our comprehension.