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Moravagine's avatar

Ezra Pound wanted to be done with Romanticism, and drew his most profound influences from writers long before and right after, always ones who were not "Romantic" in the aesthetic sense the early-to-mid 19th Century used the term. This makes your comment about Ross being the closest thing to Ezra Pound that romanticism has deeply confusing because I think you simply mean "a cheerleader for literature who influenced it into a new movement" and it doesn't say that as written.

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Derek Neal's avatar

Good review. It's great that there is this sort of burgeoning literary substack ecosystem, but I'm not convinced yet that it is any sort of defined movement. You say this as well, so I think we're in agreement. What I find interesting is that there seems to be such a strong desire among those involved to articulate what is going on with some sort of grand theory like "New Romanticism" or what ARX-Han calls "new wave literature." I'm not persuaded either of these things exist in any meaningful sense. Barkan's book, which sounds good, reminds me of Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith in its commitment to literary realism (based on what I've read about it). Gasda's "The Sleepers" brought to mind Sally Rooney in its depiction of millennial malaise. I can't speak to Kumin's or Pistelli's books, but I don't think it would be so strange to find the former two at your local bookstore, on display, and promoted by a big publisher. I'm reminded of Sam Kriss' recent article in The Point where he showed that so called "alt-lit" was pretty much indistinguishable from regular literary fiction. None of this is to dismiss what is going on, but to say that it's worth trying to describe what's happening precisely rather than with what, to me, sometimes feel like vague marketing slogans. Is mainstream literary fiction really so terrible? Is "substack fiction" really so subversive? The danger here is that on substack, we end up reproducing the very things that people so consistently criticize as features of mainstream publishing: the promotion of a few books, selected as "the right books" that the literary establishment rallies around to promote breathlessly while squashing all dissent. A healthy ecosystem has a place for negative criticism as well (see Lorentzen's "Like This or Die" in Harper's). Anyway, I sincerely hope these books go on to find success, and part of that is having a serious critical environment built up around them. This is all still in its infancy, and there are certainly signs of this happening, but just a few thoughts as things move forward.

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