Synopses & Reviews
RETHINKING POWYS
John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) was part of a large, talented family (Theodore, John Cowper and Llewelyn being the most prominent in the literary world). By the time he started writing his most admired works around 1929 the four Wessex novels (Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle), the two Welsh epics (Owen Glendower and Porius), and the unsurpassed Autobiography Powys was in his late fifties, and had already been a philosopher, a successful lecturer, a storyteller, a would-be magician and a poet.
Powys loved writing, whether it was letters, essays, novels or philosophical commentaries. He lived mainly from his writing after 1930, after nearly 30 years of lecturing (mainly in the United States). He produced many books, which included novels, philosophical essays, poetry, correspondence and literary criticism.
Some of the writers that Powys knew personally included Theodore Powys, Llewelyn Powys, Louis Wilkinson, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Hardy, William Barnes, W.B. Yeats, Dorothy Richardson, Aleister Crowley and Bertrand Russell. In America, Powys was friends with Edna Vincent Millay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Arthur Davison Ficke. He also met E.E. Cummings, Amy Lowell, Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Ford Maddox Ford and Will Durant, and performers such as Charlie Chaplin and Isadora Duncan.
In the essays in this volume, H.W. Fawkner, in Venus, explores issues of reading, movement, love and sex, the amorous self, and one of the main themes in Fawkners recent Powys criticism, affectivity. Fawkner looks at the beginning of A Glastonbury Romance, from its (in)famous opening paragraphs invoking solar and cosmic consciousness and the First Cause, to the East Anglian sequence and first chapters. Fawkners recent complex, idiosyncratic work on Powys has proved among the most challenging and insightful around.
Ian Hughes looks at the genre of Powyss novels, and how the philosophical romances were influenced by Walter Paters Marius the Epicurean. Janina Nordius discusses the crucial Powys theme of (transcendental) solitude in the key novel of the Powys-self alone, Wolf Solent (Wolf calls his under-life his mythology or life-illusion, his sinking into his soul). Nordius brings in ideas (such as the philosophy of solitude and the ichthyosaurian ego) from one of Powyss most accessible philosophical books, In Defence of Sensuality, written around the same time as Wolf Solent (1929-1930).
Joe Boulters essay concentrates on the affinities between modernism and postmodernism, pragmatism and deconstruction, in one of Powyss late novels, The Inmates (1952), via thinkers such as William James, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari. Boulter also analyzes the theme of insanity and its relation to subjectivity.
Synopsis
A new collection of essays. H.W. Fawkner's essay Venus explores issues of reading, movement, love and sex, the 'amorous self', and affectivity in A Glastonbury Romance. Ian Hughes looks at the genre of Powys's novels, and how the philosophical romances were influenced by Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean. Janina Nordius discusses the crucial Powys theme of (transcendental) solitude in the key novel of the Powys-self alone, Wolf Solent. Joe Boulter's essay concentrates on the affinities between modernism and postmodernism, pragmatism and deconstruction, in one of Powys's late novels, The Inmates, via thinkers such as William James, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari.
Synopsis
JOHN COWPER POWYS
A new collection of essays on John Cowper Powys (1872-1963). H.W. Fawkner's essay Venus explores issues of reading, movement, love and sex, the 'amorous self', and affectivity in A Glastonbury Romance. Ian Hughes looks at the genre of Powys's novels, and how the philosophical romances were influenced by Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean. Janina Nordius discusses the crucial Powys theme of (transcendental) solitude in the key novel of the Powys-self alone, Wolf Solent. Joe Boulter's essay concentrates on the affinities between modernism and postmodernism, pragmatism and deconstruction, in one of Powys's late novels, The Inmates, via thinkers such as William James, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari. ?
By the time he started writing his most admired works around 1929 - the four Wessex novels (Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle), the two Welsh epics (Owen Glendower and Porius), and the unsurpassed Autobiography - John Cowper Powys was in his late fifties. By then, he had already been a philosopher, a successful lecturer (with packed-out lectures in the U.S.A.), a storyteller, a would-be magician and a poet.
Powys loved writing, whether it was letters, essays, novels or philosophical commentaries. He lived mainly from his writing after 1930, after nearly 30 years of lecturing (mainly in the United States). He produced many books, which included novels, philosophical essays, poetry, correspondence and literary criticism.
Some of the writers that Powys knew personally included Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Hardy, William Barnes, W.B. Yeats, Dorothy Richardson, Aleister Crowley and Bertrand Russell. In America, Powys was friends with Dreiser, Edna Vincent Millay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Arthur Davison Ficke. He also met E.E. Cummings, Amy Lowell, Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Ford Maddox Ford and Will Durant, and performers such as Charlie Chaplin and Isadora Duncan.