Had a bit of trouble with 'life into the mentalite', as my brain was trying to read it as sort of mentality-lite, which would have been a good phrase, though not what you were saying.
As to 'relevance' - yeeess, it can be a motivation for ignoring it, though that tends to imply that the author has thought it through and decided not to attempt to get the mentality as right as might be possible for the period in question. And I think we've talked about that wrt Kevin Crossley-Holland and the problem of 12th century attitudes towards people of different religious beliefs: it's all too relevant to do anything other than portray main characters with extreme open-mindedness.
Ah, but - counter-example - what about Here Lies Arthur? If the relevance to Bush-Blair-Iraq War had been made any clearer, it would have had to grab the reader by the hair and slam his/her head into the book! And yet it was done without any of the type of thing I've described here. (Will come back to this. Collapsing atm...)
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Date: 2007-09-23 09:24 pm (UTC)Had a bit of trouble with 'life into the mentalite', as my brain was trying to read it as sort of mentality-lite, which would have been a good phrase, though not what you were saying.
As to 'relevance' - yeeess, it can be a motivation for ignoring it, though that tends to imply that the author has thought it through and decided not to attempt to get the mentality as right as might be possible for the period in question. And I think we've talked about that wrt Kevin Crossley-Holland and the problem of 12th century attitudes towards people of different religious beliefs: it's all too relevant to do anything other than portray main characters with extreme open-mindedness.
Ah, but - counter-example - what about Here Lies Arthur? If the relevance to Bush-Blair-Iraq War had been made any clearer, it would have had to grab the reader by the hair and slam his/her head into the book! And yet it was done without any of the type of thing I've described here. (Will come back to this. Collapsing atm...)