Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel

by Malcolm Bradbury

Novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury brings a passionate reader's zeal and the experience of 30 years' critiquing modern Aemrican and European literature to this study of the flourishing exchange of ideas between the Old World and the New. The result is a playful, engrossing literary adventure that offers a new perspective for scholars and a fascinating read for book lovers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Genres: Travel, Essays, Literary Criticism

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities—the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors—which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.

He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.

Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American.

He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5, produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies' was screened on BBC One on July 15, 2000.

Reviews

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting tracing of American and European literature throughout history beginning with the colonization of North America. I not only learned about writing styles and the authors, but also of American history and relations with Europe. There were a lot of artists and writers who moved to Paris as expatriates, setting up a whole community there between the World Wars. During WWII, many took refuge in Mexico. It was interesting to see how writing, particularly novels, changed as America grew and evolved. I was surprised, however that Bradbury did not mention Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath when depicting the 1930s' Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era. I was also interested to read how much American government influenced the rise of the European Union. He sums up, "Such is the power of the modernizing and Americanizing progress that it simply reflects the world as the world, in its form as a global equivalence of all culture. Once more it is possible to go to America to see more than America, to travel in hyper-reality." I know we were a "superpower"; I didn't realize that included culturally and literately as well.

[Peter Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant but only for English lit enthusiasts

[John Purcell · Rating 5 out of 5]

There have been many shortcuts taken in my reading life. The desire to know more, now and quickly, overriding the dictates of my more patient, plodding self. These shortcuts tend to be overviews of a subject in a single volume, written for the general reader.

I won't list them all here, but I will credit them with expanding my view and indicating pathways and hidden doors that might have gone unnoticed otherwise.

Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel by Malcolm Bradbury is the most recent of the shortcuts I have taken.

Roaming through the literary history of Europe and the Americas, Bradbury chronicles the two-way relationship between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ world over hundreds of years. Describing how each influenced the other in each era and singling out, for a more expansive critique, writers who altered the trajectory of that shared narrative.

As excellent as this is, Bradbury misses a trick with women writers, focusing his full attention on only one in the entire book, Gertrude Stein. I would have appreciated a deeper look into the works of Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, for example. And being introduced to many more I haven't read, which is what he was doing throughout with the men, and why I consider the book a shortcut. His account of the latter half of the twentieth century, where women writers were finally free to express themselves on a more equal footing, is utterly devoid of women, which is demonstrably absurd.

That being said, the book still fast tracked me through thousands of hours of reading, highlighting writers I should pay closer attention to, and introduced me to writers I otherwise might never have discovered, while describing the ebb and flow of influence between Europe and America.

As a literary shortcut, if we forgive that major flaw, it ranks up there with the best. Highly recommended.