The Erotic Motive In Literature Quotes

“fairy tales are to be interpreted like dreams and represent the fulfilled wishes of early humanity. The child who likes fairy tales finds his own wishes satisfied in these tales dealing with the supernatural and improbable.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“The realistic novels of George Eliot appeared after p England wearied of the fanciful fictions of Walter Scott. A generation passed by before the reaction set in with full force. Both writers wrote as they did, largely in obedience to the tendencies of their times, upon which they reacted and were reacted upon. They wrote because of personal repressions. Their methods of of expression were different , because of a desire to comply somewhat with literary traditions. Romanticism was fashionable in 1830, while realism was in the air in 1860.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“Literary tradition is certainly stronger than originality. And the thousands of authors of our day who write novels and short stories, would in medieval times have written allegories.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“I believe that more can be learned of the life of Shakespeare from his plays than from such documents showing that he sued people for small debts. I hold to the theory that a pattern of similar events, concentration on a similar emotion occurring in several plays indicated a strong personal motive. I am however opposed to deducing personal conclusions from an isolated episode or often from a casual remark by a character.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“The question now arises, what effect will a knowledge of the author's unconscious have in making us appreciate his work as literature? [...] It is our contention that a literary work in better appreciated after the facts about an author's life revealed to us, and this does not usually happen for years after his death. One of the reasons why masterpieces cannot be fully comprehended in an author's lifetime is that we do not know altogether how he came to write the works in questions.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“He [Edgar Allan Poe] was so absorbed in his dreams that he never tried to take an interest in reality. Hence we find no moral note in Poe's work; there is one exception, "William Wilson." He took no interest in philanthropy, reforms, transcendentalism, or other movements of the day, and he disliked Emerson. One would never know from his work whether he lived nineteenth or in the eighteenth or twentieth century. One does not know from his work that there was a Mexican war or a slavery problem in his day.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“The unconscious is present in all literature, and the literary movement but colors it and gives occasion for the expression or censorship of certain phases of it. Puritan writers are not in their unconscious any different from from the "immoral" ones; only the later relax the censor and give full play to the unconscious, when a liberal age like that of the Restoration or the Renaissance, permits it.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“Literary historians and philosophers have accounted for the various changes in literary taste fairly satisfactorily, although they have often omitted from their investigations the factor of the personal experiences and idiosyncrasies of the author, and have emphasized too strongly the importance of the predominant ideas off the age. Yet no author starts out to express the spirit of his age. He gives vent to his unconscious which he suppresses more or less, and colors in accordance with the literary fashion prevailing. His unconscious appears in a background of the literary machinery and ideas of the time. Since in our unconscious are present all the emotions man has had, different events may make any of them burst forth.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“What then is the cause of literary movements and what stamps the peculiarities of a literary age, if all writers draw on their unconscious?”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“When a man says that he found his whole life changed by a certain book is equivalent to his saying that the book has merely made him recognize his unconscious; it did not put anything there that was not there before.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“The literary works that we like best are those which tell us of the frustration of wishes like our own. We prefer to read about troubles like those we have suffered, to lose ourselves in the dreams and fantasies built up by authors, akin to those we have conjured up in our own imagination.
We prefer a book that apologizes for us, that tells of strivings and repressions such as we have experienced. We get a sort of pleasure then out of painful works, in which our sorrows and wants are put into artistic form, so as to evoke them again in us and hence purge us.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature

“Probably the greatest objection to the application of psychoanalytic methods to literature will be made to the transference of the sexual interpretation of symbols from the realm of dreams to that of art. But if the interpretation is correct in one sphere it is also true in the other. Civilization has made it necessary to refer in actual speech to sexual matters in hidden ways, by symbolic representations; our faculty of wit, due to the exercise of censorship, also uses various devices of symbolization. dreams and literature both make use of the same symbols.”
― Albert Mordell, The Erotic Motive In Literature