Reception
Several early commentators, emphasizing the first part of the book, see it as part of the US self-help and positive thinking culture, epitomised by Norman Vincent Peale and by the New Thought movement. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the book was "banal," and that "The Little Engine That Could is, by comparison, a work of some depth and ambition."
The book is listed as one of 50 "timeless spiritual classics" in a book by Tom Butler-Bowdon, who noted that "it is easy now, 35 years on, to overlook the originality of the book's concept, and though some find it rather naïve, in fact it expresses timeless ideas about human potential."
John Clute, for The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (in which capitalized typesetting represents literary themes and categories for that book), wrote: "an ANIMAL FANTASY about a philosophical gull who is profoundly affected by FLYING, but who demands too much of his community and is cast out by it. He becomes an extremely well behaved ACCURSED WANDERER, then dies, and in POST-HUMOUS FANTASY sequences — though he is too wise really to question the fact of death, and too calmly confident to have doubts about his continuing upward mobility — he learns greater wisdom. Back on Earth, he continues to preach and heal and finally returns to HEAVEN, where he belongs."
Read more about this topic: Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)