Ivanhoe
The father of the historical novel, Sir Walter Scott invented a literary form that has remained popular for over one hundred and fifty years. Infusing his works with romance, action, and suspense, he brought long-gone eras back to life with splendor and spectacle.Set in England just after the Third Crusade, Ivanhoe is the tale of Wilfrid, a young Saxon knight, and his love for the royal princess Rowena. With his father against their union, Wilfrid embarks on a series of adventures to prove his worth, finding himself in conflict against the Normans and the Templars, and allied with such larger-than-life figures as Robin Hood and Richard the Lion Hearted. A timeless story of courage, chivalry, and courtly love, Ivanhoe is a grand epic, and its place in classical literature is assured.
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What Hacker News says
- The main problem is teachers not adjusting the books to the personality of the student. I often wonder if many US high-school English teachers don't actually read anything outside of their curriculum literature.
The glory of English literature is that it varies widely. Want a swashbuckle? Got it--here's "Ivanhoe". Want a soap opera? "Tom Jones". All manner of surreal? Roald Dahl. Incredibly dark humor? Late Mark Twain.
Even when someone says "I don't like author <X>.", if someone explains what they don't like, you can often find a different story that they like just fine.
By contrast, forcing "Pride and Prejudice" or "Wuthering Heights" onto a ninth grade teenager who digs surreal humor is just going to make them want to give up on reading completely.
- I think the golden age of historical fiction is long past, of works like:
-Walter Scott's Ivanhoe
-George Eliot's Romola
-Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis
-Bulwer Lytton's Last days of Pompeii
-Evelyn Waugh's Helena
-Anatole France's God's are athirst.
-Tolstoy's War and Peace
-Gore Vidal's Burr and also some of the others.
- Ivanhoe is a great read, Scott's pastiche of age-of-chivalry novels, but modern readers will probably find the treatment of the Jewish character Isaac to be glaringly bad antisemitism. (Oddly, his daughter Rebecca is far less presented as a stereotype and more as one of Scott's "strong female characters")
- I think my dad did the same thing. The two books I remember him recommending were: Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Heinlein and Ivanhoe but Sir Walter Scott. If you don't mind sharing what books did your dad recommend?
- At least in the case of meat vs animal, this was pointed out in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, published 1819-1820.
- Dumas himself had a personal library of about 6,000 books at its peak. If you don't already have them on your list, historians have mentioned several books that were known to have strongly influenced him:
Walter Scott's historical novels, particularly "Ivanhoe" and "Waverley," which inspired Dumas' approach to historical fiction
James Fenimore Cooper's frontier adventures, which influenced his action narratives
Lord Byron's romantic poetry and persona, which shaped Dumas' conception of the romantic hero
Schiller's play "The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa," which Dumas translated and adapted early in his career
Shakespeare's dramatic works
Memoirs of historical figures, particularly those from the 17th and 18th centuries, including Courtilz de Sandras' "Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan," which became the foundation for "The Three Musketeers"
Plutarch's "Lives," which informed his understanding of classical historical figures
Works by Abbé Prévost and other French novelists of the 18th century
The Bible and classical mythology
