Tradition and Change

Over in the Reading Globally group, this year's fourth quarter is devoted to Tradition and Change. Reading Globally is a group that concentrates on writing from those parts of the world where the language is other than English. It is mostly for fictional works, but there is nonfiction as well.

Looking at this quarter's topic, it seemed that there was so much written about it in English, that those works deserved their own thread. Here is the introduction to the Reading Globally quarter:

One thing we can rely on is change. While we may be so busy with the changes in our own lives that we don't notice change happening in the world around us, be it religious, political, cultural, scientific, societal, environmental or anything else you can think of, changes is out there.

Sometimes change is messy. It's not always for the good. It many be so incremental that at first few pick up on it. It may come from the top down, or filter up in populist or revolutionary movements.

There are those who oppose particular changes; some with valid reasons, others for beliefs rooted in tradition and sometimes superstition.

Writers hold a central place in all this. They have often been the ones to first articulate new ideas and their books have then become instrumental in generating or reflecting change. Many have suffered for setting down their ideas, others have been feted.

For now, here are a few books, fiction and nonfiction, as well as some authors. This is only a start. Many of these deal with political change, so please add your own ideas and suggestions from other realms, or add to this one.

Here are some of the books which came to mind from English language writers:

Fiction

Uncle Tom's Cabin
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Felix Holt the Radical
The Grapes of Wrath
Nineteen Eighty-four
Tropic of Cancer

Non Fiction

Vindication of the Rights of Women
On the Origin of Species
Walden
Silent Spring
Ten Days that Shook the World
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Black like Me
The Female Eunuch
Rules for Radicals
Shake Hands with the Devil
The Tipping Point

Other changes came from putting religious texts into the vernacular, or collating dictionaries.

It takes time to know if a given book will have a long lasting effect, so most of these are older titles. What current books would be on future lists.?

I am late to this post. Perhaps now that the election is over my LT activity and reading will return to normal. Geesh, you like those deep, complex, hard to answer questions, don't you? :-)

Doesn't most literature deal with change in one way or another? Of course, there are cultural changes and traditions and personal change and growth. Certainly, any coming-of-age novel is about change. The hero's journey and all that. And Pride & Prejudice certainly documents personal changes. Stories of death. Stories of war. Many of the crimes in Scandinavian crime novels reflect local political, cultural or enviromental changes (immigration into Scandinavia, for example). What character makes it to the end of a book without being changed? What book isn't about the tension between what was and what is or what will be?

Perhaps you are only talking about those cultural and societal changes or traditions? Or scientific and environmental changes? OR exploration?

(the idea of this is too big, it's making my head explode! :-)

The Chronicle of Higher Ed recently posted a piece on The New Canon. And while I'm not sure all of them are absolutely canon-worthy (though what is?), it's an interesting selection.

>2 avaland:
Oh no, hold on to your head!

I would agree with you completely about most literature dealing with change in one way or another. I think for this topic you could choose any of the changes you mention and devote a whole lifetime of reading to it, there is so much to contemplate. Perhaps it can be narrowed down infinitesimally by looking at the tensions between tradition and change, be it societal, scientific or to keep with your intro, political. My own head is beginning to explode.

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Is the election really over? There seems to be more news about it every day.

>3 lisapeet: interesting link, thanks for that. It would be interesting to get ideas on the same topic from other countries and see if the themes are the same.

>3 lisapeet: What an interesting list of nonfiction books indeed. Thanks for posting that. T. I remember reading Bowling Alone back when it first came out and had a recent discussion about it with a 20-something man who was staying with us. He was just out of grad school and here to work for the Democratic party. He had read it and brought it up in the conversation. And I see Susan J Douglas has a book on that list. She wrote one of my favorite books, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.

>4 SassyLassy: And I had really only been considering fiction.

The Scandinavian Crime Fiction book I recently read is about how certain Nordic writers, beginning in the 1960s, used the genre to explore the symptoms of the "shattered dream" of the utopian social welfare state.

>5 avaland: That looks tempting. I will have to check out the library. I must admit to being a fan of the genre. I see that there are only three other copies on LT. How did you discover it?

I think it, or something like it, may have popped up while shopping for some Nordic crime novels which led me off on a merry path to find others and which of those on offer I might like best. I do like to read about books & lit, which should explain past readings in feminist lit and women’s writing, tragedy, Gothic lit, dystopias, African lit, popular culture which includes popular lit and bestsellers ...😜