G. K. Chesterton is remembered as a brilliant creator
of nonsense and satirical verse, author of the Father
Brown stories and the innovative novel, The Man who was
Thursday, and yet today he is not counted among the
major English novelists and poets. However, this major
new biography argues that Chesterton should be seen as
the successor of the great Victorian prose writers,
Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, and above all Newman.
Chesterton's achievement as one of the great English
literary critics has not hitherto been fully recognized,
perhaps because his best literary criticism is of prose
rather than poetry. Ian Ker remedies this neglect,
paying particular attention to Chesterton's writings on
the Victorians, especially Dickens. As a social and
political thinker, Chesterton is contrasted here with
contemporary intellectuals like Bernard Shaw and H. G.
Wells in his championing of democracy and the masses.
Pre-eminently a controversialist, as revealed in his
prolific journalistic output, he became a formidable
apologist for Christianity and Catholicism, as well as a
powerful satirist of anti-Catholicism. This full-length
life of G. K.Chesterton is the first comprehensive
biography of both the man and the writer. It draws on
many unpublished letters and papers to evoke
Chesterton's joyful humour, his humility and affinity to
the common man, and his love of the ordinary things of
life. |
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