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W.H. Auden's life and work were perhaps best explained and condensed in the words of Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, when he remarked, "[Auden] grew up in a household in which the scientific inquiries of his father maintained an uneasy truce with the ritualized religion of his mother." Indeed, science and religion were dominant themes in Auden's life and work, which for him were oftentimes one and the same. Auden was hailed as the new T.S. Eliot and as the "coming" man, greatly influencing the future generations of angry young men with his thoughts on science, religion, and the relationship between the two. This book is an exhaustive reference to W.H. Auden. Those new to Auden a...
Aldous Huxley's prophetic novel of ideas warned of a terrible future then 600 years away. Though Brave New World was published less than a century ago in 1932, many elements of the novel's dystopic future now seem an eerily familiar part of life in the 21st century. These essays analyze the influence of Brave New World as a literary and philosophical document and describe how Huxley forecast the problems of late capitalism. Topics include the anti-utopian ideals represented by the rigid caste system depicted, the novel's influence on the philosophy of "culture industry" philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the Nietzschean birth of tragedy in the novel's penultimate scene, and the relationship of the novel to other dystopian works.
This volume discusses the relationships between the philosophy of Mysticism, which traces its lineage back into prehistory, with that of the world of more traditional philosophy and literature. The author argues for the centrality of mysticism's role in the philosophical and artistic development of western culture. The connections between these worlds are underscored as the author examines the works of Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Iris Murdoch, Yeats, Æ (George Russell), T.S. Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, Huxley, Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Tony Kushner, among others.
One of the best known and most widely read of early African American writers, Charles W. Chesnutt published more than fifty short stories, six novels, two plays, a biography of Frederick Douglass, and countless essays, poems, letters, journals, and speeches. Though he had light skin and was of mixed race, Chesnutt self-identified as a black man, and his writing was often boldly political, openly addressing problems of racial identity and injustice in the late 19th century. This collection of critical essays reevaluates the Chesnutt legacy, introducing new scholarship reflective of the many facets of his fiction, especially his sophisticated narrative strategies.
This comprehensive and accessible reference work serves Isherwood scholars who need quick access to people, places, novels, stories, essays and plays, introduces Isherwood to those who know little of him, expands the knowledge of the literate general reader, and refreshes teachers of literature with Isherwood details. Entries on Isherwood's most influential friends, including W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley and Stephen Spender, are significant. Included are all of the monumental "roles" Isherwood exemplified during his life--writer, rebel, gay-activist hero, and proud exponent of the Eastern philosophy known as Vedanta.
Aldous Huxley described Gerald Heard as “that rare being—a learned man who [made] his mental home on the vacant spaces between the pigeonholes.” Heard’s off-beat interests made him a cultural and intellectual pioneer on both sides of the Atlantic in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Despite accolades from such figures as E.M. Forster, who characterized him as “one of the most penetrating minds in England,” and Christopher Isherwood, who described him upon his death as one of the “few great magic mythmakers and revealers of life’s wonder,” Heard is largely unknown today. Between the Pigeonholes is the first published full-length study of Gerald Heard. Alison Falby...
Writer Henry James (1843-1916) was born in America but preferred to live in Europe; he finally become a British subject near the end of his life. His status as a permanent outsider is responsible for the recurring themes in his writing dealing with European sophistication (decadence) compared to American lack of sophistication (or innocence). He is respected in modern times for his psychological insight, for being able to reveal his characters' deepest motivations. These 11 essays, along with an introduction and an afterword, examine James's work through the prism of the author's latest style. Topics the contributing authors address include the Henry James revival of the 1930s, three of James's male aesthetics, women in his works, literary forgery, and parallels with the career and views of Margaret Oliphant. Three essays delve into issues of representation in art and fiction, then three more explore decadence, identity and homosexuality.
For fifty years, the American Richard Stern has been praised as a "writer's writer." His collected stories in Noble Rot 1949-1989 earned him a Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Sun-Times, adding to his recognition as one of America's most acclaimed writers of fiction in novels and short stories. This study of Stern's life and writings discusses major themes Stern has dealt with, explores the issue of fictional autobiography as it relates to Stern's work, and analyzes each of his published novels and short stories from Golk(1960) to Pacific Tremors and What Is What Was (both 2001). An interview with Richard Stern is included.
"Early in the twentieth century, Americans and other English-speaking nations began to regard adolescence as a separate phase of life. Associated with uncertainty, inwardness, instability, and sexual energy, adolescence acquired its own tastes, habits, subcultures, slang, economic interests, and art forms." "The first comprehensive study of adolescence in twentieth-century poetry, The Forms of Youth recasts the history of how English-speaking cultures began to view this phase of life as a valuable state of consciousness, if not the very essence of a Western identity."--BOOK JACKET.
Henry James defied posterity to disturb his bones: he was adamant that his legacy be based exclusively on his publications and that his private life and writings remain forever private. Despite this, almost immediately after his death in 1916 an intense struggle began among his family and his literary disciples to control his posthumous reputation, a struggle that was continued by later generations of critics and biographers. Monopolizing the Master gives a blow-by-blow account of this conflict, which aroused intense feelings of jealousy, suspicion, and proprietorship among those who claimed to be the just custodians of James's literary legacy. With an unprecedented amount of new evidence now available, Michael Anesko reveals the remarkable social, political, and sexual intrigue that inspired—and influenced—the deliberate construction of the Legend of the Master.