This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting . . . to roam the world since Candide." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the eighteenth-century picaresque novel-think Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy-is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world. It's the late seventeenth ...
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This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting . . . to roam the world since Candide." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire of the eighteenth-century picaresque novel-think Fielding's Tom Jones or Sterne's Tristram Shandy-is also an earnest picture of the pitfalls awaiting innocence as it makes its unsteady way in the world. It's the late seventeenth century and Ebenezer Cooke is a poet, dutiful son and determined virgin who travels from England to Maryland to take possession of his father's tobacco (or "sot weed") plantation. He is also eventually given to believe that he has been commissioned by the third Lord Baltimore to write an epic poem, The Marylandiad. But things are not always what they seem. Actually, things are almost never what they seem. Not since Candide has a steadfast soul witnessed so many strange scenes or faced so many perils. Pirates, Indians, shrewd prostitutes, armed insurrectionists-Cooke endures them all, plus assaults on his virginity from both women and men. Barth's language is impossibly rich, a wickedly funny take on old English rhetoric and American self-appraisals. For good measure he throws in stories within stories, including the funniest retelling of the Pocahontas tale-revealed to us in the 'secret' journals of Capt. John Smith-that anyone has ever dared to tell." -Time
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Add this copy of Sot-Weed Factor (Dalkey Archive Essentials) to cart. $26.19, like new condition, Sold by Ebooksweb rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Bensalem, PA, UNITED STATES, published 2023 by Dalkey Archive Press.
Add this copy of Sot-Weed Factor (Dalkey Archive Essentials) to cart. $26.49, new condition, Sold by Ebooksweb rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Bensalem, PA, UNITED STATES, published 2023 by Dalkey Archive Press.
Here we have a tediously long but quite thorough definition of why college professors should not make use of all that they know and more than they can imagine to cobble together a picaresque travesty. Recreating an imaginary and perhaps necessarily clumsy (b'm'faith) Seventeenth Century environment solely to write a badly overplotted and underfunny Eighteenth Century novel about it seems in retrospect not to have been Professor Barth's brightest inspiration. IMHO of course as the young folks would say.
