To expand: I googled [["based on * eponymous"]] and was like, whoa, millions of hits? But on looking at them, I realized it was, broadly speaking, a usage I see all the time, and don't remember ever looking twice at before.
The factors I mentioned *seem* to be what separate good sentences from bad in my head, but whether those guesses are right or not, it's pretty clear that the rule I pedantically want to insist on is not the rule I usually actually apply when reading.
So that's interesting!
Also, it occurs to me that changing the order would normally make it a lot harder for a writer to use "his" instead of "the". I think you'd have to find some way to stick the writer's name between the title and the pronoun, like
"THE DUEL is one of Chekhov's finest cinematic moments, based on his eponymous 1891 novella..."
I mean, even then I don't like it much stylistically, but I'm much less sure I've even run into it in the wild.
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Date: 2010-09-27 10:28 pm (UTC)The factors I mentioned *seem* to be what separate good sentences from bad in my head, but whether those guesses are right or not, it's pretty clear that the rule I pedantically want to insist on is not the rule I usually actually apply when reading.
So that's interesting!
Also, it occurs to me that changing the order would normally make it a lot harder for a writer to use "his" instead of "the". I think you'd have to find some way to stick the writer's name between the title and the pronoun, like
"THE DUEL is one of Chekhov's finest cinematic moments, based on his eponymous 1891 novella..."
I mean, even then I don't like it much stylistically, but I'm much less sure I've even run into it in the wild.