Entries
THE COHERENT PLOT OF GABRIEL CONROY (V)
Bret Harte’s California, his regional mythmaking effort embodied in twenty volumes of collected works, also includes the tyranny of lynch mobs. The formation of a lynch mob soon transforms the formerly idyllic One Horse Gulch into lawless pandemonium. In this …
THE COHERENT PLOT OF GABRIEL CONROY (IV)
Book Fifth occasions the end of the novel. In the original American Publishing Company edition, it is the last “book” of Gabriel Conroy, disproportionately containing 28 chapters. The Standard Library Edition of his collected works rearranged some of these last …
THE COHERENT PLOT OF GABRIEL CONROY (III)
Stylistically, Harte’s description of the Spanish Quarter in San Francisco displays archetypal terminology. The changing “grade” refers to the original hillside on which the dwellings of San Francisco were first erected in the Spanish era of Californian history. A “grade” …
THE COHERENT PLOT OF GABRIEL CONROY (II)
Here in Harte’s prologue, relating to the rest of the novel, nature provides not only a rescue but a doom of gusty winds to scatter the records of one’s existence (footprints in snow and the secret location a silver mine). …
THE COHERENT PLOT OF GABRIEL CONROY (I)
This portion of the thesis discusses the skills and techniques Bret Harte uses to create a strong plot in Gabriel Conroy. One of these techniques is affective reading, which has been undervalued in critical analysis since the rise of New …
THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF GABRIEL CONROY (V)
One contemplates with wonder what the anonymous reviewer of the Saturday Review considers “ruffianly” about the fundamentally sympathetic qualities of Gabriel Conroy’s title character, Jack Hamlin, and to a lesser degree, Arthur Poinsett. Moreover, the nefarious attribution of Gabriel Conroy …
THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF GABRIEL CONROY (IV)
Moreover, later biographers have almost all dismissed Gabriel Conroy as an abject failure. Even when generally praising Harte, the writer, as Henry Childs Merwin does, the novel he believes remains such a nuisance “…that there are times when the reader …
THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF GABRIEL CONROY (III)
Unfortunately, most critics of Gabriel Conroy dismissed the novel outright, as O’Brien indicates while paraphrasing some. It should be noted, however, that timed with the novel’s appearance, in December, 1875, in Scribner’s Miscellany, a supplement to Scribner’s Monthly, there appeared …
THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF GABRIEL CONROY (II)
Harte also wrote creatively and successfully in forms other than the short story. These non-short story works include several volumes of good poetry, some literary theory (e.g., “The Rise of the Short Story,” “American Humor”), over ten plays (most of …
THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF GABRIEL CONROY (I)
Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy, from a historical point of view, was, in fact, the first representative Californian novel. In Gabriel Conroy, as well as in Harte’s stories and poems, California resembles a new land, as well as an old one, …