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    The Cords of Vanity (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
    Unavailable
    The Cords of Vanity (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
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    The Cords of Vanity (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
    Ebook293 pages4 hours

    The Cords of Vanity (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

    By James Branch Cabell

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    This 1909 novel is narrated by Robert Etheridge Townsend, a young Southern writer recounting a life of wealth and leisure in the waning years of the nineteenth century.  It is a gentle but not un-barbed satire of manners that skewers snobbery and convenience marriages.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarnes & Noble
    Release dateMar 22, 2011
    ISBN9781411444317
    Unavailable
    The Cords of Vanity (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
    Author

    James Branch Cabell

    James Branch Cabell; (April 14, 1879 – May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare." Although escapist, Cabell's works are ironic and satirical. Mencken disputed Cabell's claim to romanticism and characterized him as "really the most acidulous of all the anti-romantics. His gaudy heroes ... chase dragons precisely as stockbrokers play golf." Cabell saw art as an escape from life, but found that, once the artist creates his ideal world, it is made up of the same elements that make the real one

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    Reviews for The Cords of Vanity (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

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    • 4/5
      This is probably the one book by Cabell the critics like least . . . or is that "detest the most"? It is the tale of an on-the-make lover, Robert Townshend, and his trail of courting young women, one by one. The book is written in the first person. It relates a series of liaisons not so much dangerous as callous and calculating. And yet, in the back of the narrator's mind, this indication that he's missing something. The comedy reaches its highest point in a clash of mutual betrayal by two lovers who engage in love only to make literature of it. This is one of the funnier moments in Cabell's oeuvre, though, perhaps, it does not redeem a novel from what, in its day, was its obvious immorality. Today, of course, most readers would be bored, and see not so much immorality as too much talk.Times have changed. I'm afraid I still like the book, though.