Behind every great book are the books which influenced it, continues Seymour Tribune.
The “micro-learning” app and platform blinkist.com has been compiling
literary sources for such classics as “A Clockwork Orange,” ”Oliver
Twist” and “1984.” Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” was inspired by each of
her parents — William Godwin’s “An Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice” and Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of
Women.”
One of the defining novels of the Civil War era, Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” drew in part upon one of the defining
memoirs, “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave.” Douglass’ book, which remains standard reading in many schools,
also was cited by Toni Morrison for her Pulitzer Prize winning
historical novel “Beloved.”...
Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” reflected the author’s reading of the
philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, along with works about Napoleon and
French history. According to Tolstoy scholar Ani Kokobobo, the author
was “captivated” by Schopenhauer and his belief that “death is the only
reality,” a viewpoint expressed by the cerebral Prince Andrei
Nikolayevich Bolkonsky in “War and Peace.” Kokobobo also noted that “War
and Peace” was a response in part to such French scholarship as Adolphe
Thiers’ “History of the Consulate and the Empire of France Under
Napoleon,” which Tolstoy believed exaggerated Napoleon’s stature and
military ideas.
“Tolstoy did not believe in this ‘great man’ theory, also propagated
by Thomas Carlyle, and thought that victory and defeat were not
determined by a sole heroic leader, but rather by the collective
alignment of the will of thousands,” said Kokobobo, editor of the
Tolstoy Studies Journal.
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Source: Seymour Tribune