Model
Digital Document
Publisher
Florida Atlantic University
Description
G. K. Chesterton is known for writing detective fiction, his Father Brown crime stories being his most popular works. Chesterton, however, wrote more than a hundred books. The Man Who Was Thursday is Chesterton's fictional masterpiece. The novel reveals the author as a creative genius, at least equal to now-better-known writers of his time, such as Conrad and Kafka. Chesterton tells detective Gabriel Syme's tale in the novel, which also exudes an autobiographical flavor, giving fragments of Chesterton's own story of his escape from fin-de-siecle pessimism. As literary art, the novel merges the detective genre with the genre of the fantastic. The result is a wild tale of fun and romance, with more than a little philosophical argument in the mix. Using Tzvetan Todorov's theory of structuralism, I unveil the many masks of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. The outcome is a better understanding of G. K. Chesterton's rebellion into orthodoxy.
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