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Arthur Llewellyn Jones |
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Arthur Machen's works cannot be classified as novels in the usual sense. The greatest body of his canon consists of essays and supernatural tales. The common chord, however, that runs throughout is the spirit of romance. His position is made clear in Hieroglyphics (1902), his book of criticism, which attempts to establish the essential difference between great and ordinary literature, a distinction which he terms "ecstasy"--the creation of wonder, of with-drawal from common life, and of the sense of the unknown. These qualities are exemplified best, in his opinion, by Pantagruel, Don Quixote,The Pickwick Papers, and The Odyssey, works which he unceasingly and abortively attempted to emulate by creating the Great Romance. Though he knew Oscar Wilde slightly and though his Bodley Head publications of the 1890s were illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, Machen claimed to have had no part in the aesthetic-decadent movement of that period, a contention belied by his belated romanticism and interest in the weird and occult.
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