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At first glance, the works of Fedor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) do not appear to have much in common with those of the controversial American writer Henry Miller (1891-1980). However, the influencer of Dostoevsky on Miller was, in fact, enormous and shaped the latter's view of the world, of literature, and of his own writing. The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon examines the obsession that Miller and his contemporaries, the so-called Villa Seurat circle, had with Dostoevsky, and the impact that this obsession had on their own work. Renowned for his psychological treatment of characters, Dostoevsky became a model for Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Anais Nin, interested as they were in developing a ...
Oft-neglected Personalist writers of 1930s–40s comprise a missing link between modernist and postmodernist literatures.
First published in Spain in the summer of 1929, Concerning the Angels (Sobre los angeles) is the great Spanish poet Rafael Alberti's masterpiece, on a par with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Pablo Neruda's Residencia en la tierra, and Federico Garcia Lorca's Poeta en Nueva York. It marks a major departure from the light-hearted tone of the poet's earlier verse, which was notably influence by Andalusian folksong. This bilingual text is at once intensely imaginative and intimately realistic, a lyrical illumination of the poet's "dark night of the soul." Rafael Alberti, born in 1902, is the last surviving member of the so-called Generation of 1927 that included such notable Spanish poets Federico Garcia Lorca, Vincente Alexandre, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillen, and Luis Cernuda. Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno lives in Massachusetts and teaches in the program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT.
The life story of the bohemian socialite who rebelled against her famous family and became a renowned art collector. Peggy Guggenheim was the ultimate self-invented woman, a cultural mover and shaker who broke away from her poor-little-rich-girl origins to shape a life for herself as the enfant terrible of the art world. Her visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-shaking “happening” at the center of its time. In Mistress of Modernism, Mary V. Dearborn draws upon her unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers to craft a “thorough biography . ...
Miller as a writer whose work does something more profound and violent to literary conventions than produce novel effects: it announces the possibility of difference and instability within language itself. Henry Miller is a cult figure in the world of fiction, in part due to having been banned for obscenity for nearly thirty years. Alongside the liberating effect of his explicit treatment of sexuality, however, Miller developed a provocative form of writing that encourages the reader to question language as a stable communicative tool and to consider the act of writing as an ongoing mode of creation, always in motion, perpetually establishing itself and creating meaning through that very mot...
In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ...
This study argues that this previously banned author devoted his entire life to articulating a religion of self-liberation in his autobiographical books, examining his life and work within the context of fringe religious movements that were linked with the avant-garde in New York City and Paris at the first of the 20th century. This study shows how these transatlantic movements – including Gurdjieff, Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy – gave him the hermeneutical devices, not to mention the creative license, to interpret texts and symbols from mainline religions in an iconoclastic manner, ranging from obscure Taoist treatises to the mystical works of Jacob Boehme. The influence of numerous ph...
No city has attracted so much literary talent, launched so many illustrious careers, or produced such a wealth of enduring literature as Paris. From the 15th century through the 20th, poets, novelists, and playwrights, famed for both their work an...
Brings Henry Miller back to the critical attention that his work deserves as well as making an original contribution to literary discussion on intertextuality.