Craft Wednesday #9 A Thought on Titles

This blog needed a place for talking about writing. "Craft Wednesday" will be me talking about all things writing: how to write, why to write, and my own craft journey. I hope to learn and to share experiences with you.   

A Thought on Titles

     I thought I would give a lecture on how, within the last two centuries, the title of books has shifted from relatively commonplace names and locations ( A Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick, The Three Musketeers) to exotic and even abstracted titles ( The Da Vinci Code, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath), as if the objective backbone had fallen away from literature and left warm, nebulous, subjective attitudes reflected in figurative and somewhat transferable titles, such as Lord of the Flies.

     I believed I could say something concerning the shift from titular proper nouns to abstract nouns, and how it reveals a shift in focus away from one all-important, all consuming character or location, and towards the secular virtues of sensation, conceptualism, and turbulent emotion.

     I assumed these trends were the result of a metaphorical moral compass disturbed in its readings of true north by the multitude of distractions offered by the postmodern world.

     Instead, I decided not to write a tome about the process of naming novels, but a list. In this list, titles from books I consider old will be updated to reflect a postmodern attitude, while books written after the first World War will be assigned a title reflecting propriety and an all-encompassing formal noun.

     Enjoy my little experiment in naming.

Original Title - Author - Year Published -- Revised Title

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger - 1951 -- The Adventures of Holden Caulfield

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott - 1868-9 -- My Sisters' Keeper OR Our Father's Daughters

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - 1873-7 -- Far From Monogamy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - 1979 -- The Man From Earth

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - 1865 -- Down the Rabbit Hole

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - 1843 -- Marley Said So

The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - 1844 -- Republics and Monarchies OR Sealed With a Lily

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - 2004 -- Incidents in Time and Place

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - 1892 -- Sherlocked

The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom - 2003 -- The Maintenance Man

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - 1856 -- A Few Lessons in Adultery

Twilight - Stephanie Meyer - 2005 -- Vampire House

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis - 1950 -- Lucy in Narnia

     These novels would likely be received differently if they had different names. 

     Or would they? Shakespeare's Juliet asks, "What's in a name?"  A first impression, certainly, and an altered judgment from those who judge a book by its cover.