Myra Breckinridge | Literary Precedents

Myra Breckinridge Literary Precedents

Henry James's experiments with multiple narrators in works like The Princess Casamassima (1886) and The Golden Bowl (1904) are behind Vidal's use of alternating narrators. James's experiments, in turn, have behind them a long tradition including works like Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) and earlier epistolary novels, for example the anonymous Lazarillo de Tonnes, La Princesse de Cleves (The Princess of Cleves, 1678) by Madame de La Fayette, Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Love Affairs) by P.-A.-F. Choderlos de Laclos, and Clarissa (1932) by Samuel Richardson. In his use of transcripts of unedited tape recordings for one of the narrative voices, Vidal also owes something to the documentary novel illustrated by the John Dos Passos work U.S.A. (1930-1936) and Bel Kaufman's Up The Down Staircase (1964). This technique substitutes for a straightforward narrative a gathering together without authorial comment of materials from which the reader pieces together a story. Discussing Vidal's...
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