In the Spirit of Powys: New EssaysDenis Lane Bucknell University Press, 1990 - 268 pages This work is a collection of essays on the work of John Cowper Powys, the English novelist and Nobel nominee. The critical intention of these essays is to provide a picture of Powys's achievement. |
From inside the book
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Page 7
... cultural struggles in every volatile period of artistic production . The romantic period , to take only the most obvious case , illustrates the situation very well . For one thing , romanticism had to struggle against other cultural and ...
... cultural struggles in every volatile period of artistic production . The romantic period , to take only the most obvious case , illustrates the situation very well . For one thing , romanticism had to struggle against other cultural and ...
Page 8
... cultural repudiations directed at romantic and , more particularly , Victorian traditions . Modernism imagines itself as a new birth of artistic freedom , an evolutionary leap beyond the tired and over- used formulas of the nineteenth ...
... cultural repudiations directed at romantic and , more particularly , Victorian traditions . Modernism imagines itself as a new birth of artistic freedom , an evolutionary leap beyond the tired and over- used formulas of the nineteenth ...
Page 14
... Culture . Thus to consider these novels together is to trace the intensity in the growth of Powys's thought and imagination during these years and to be brought into touch with the mind of the artist at its most fertile and energetic ...
... Culture . Thus to consider these novels together is to trace the intensity in the growth of Powys's thought and imagination during these years and to be brought into touch with the mind of the artist at its most fertile and energetic ...
Page 19
... Culture ( 1929 ) and the following magnificently affirmative passage . There is no man or woman in the world who does not experience vague feelings of mystical power , of Cosmic power , bringing him a strange sense of belonging , even ...
... Culture ( 1929 ) and the following magnificently affirmative passage . There is no man or woman in the world who does not experience vague feelings of mystical power , of Cosmic power , bringing him a strange sense of belonging , even ...
Page 23
... cultural forms and concerns , the essential anachronism of his achievement — or whether to resist such comfortable assump- tions , and the easy judgments implicit in them , and strive instead to unfold his centrality . The dilemma ...
... cultural forms and concerns , the essential anachronism of his achievement — or whether to resist such comfortable assump- tions , and the easy judgments implicit in them , and strive instead to unfold his centrality . The dilemma ...
Contents
23 | |
43 | |
The Elemental Image in Wolf Solent | 55 |
The mysterious word Esplumeoir and Polyphonic Structure in A Glastonbury Romance | 71 |
Rituals of Return | 86 |
Margins and Thresholds in Weymouth Sands | 112 |
John Cowper Powys and Nonbeing | 136 |
Maiden Castle and The Plumed Serpent | 157 |
Animating Fictions in Maiden Castle | 180 |
The Lie of the Land or Plot and Autochthony in John Cowper Powys | 193 |
Porius and the Cauldron of Rebirth | 214 |
Powysian Answers | 236 |
Contributors | 258 |
Index | 258 |
Common terms and phrases
aboriginal Autobiography autochthonous Belinda Humfrey Blodeuwedd Brochvael cauldron Cavaliero Celtic chapter characters Christie consciousness Cordelia creative Creiddylad critical culture D. H. Lawrence dark dead death Dorset Dud's Eliot English erotic Esplumeoir essay Evans Evans's experience father feeling Finnegans Wake forces Geard genius loci Gerda Glastonbury Romance Grail human imagination James Joyce John Cowper Powys John Crow Joyce's landscape Lawrence's literature living Llewelyn Llewelyn Powys London magic Magnus Maiden Castle marginal mind Miss Drew modern Myrddin Myrddin Wyllt mysterious mystical myth narrative nature Nonbeing novelist occult passage past philosophy Plumed Serpent Porius Porius's Powys Review Powys's Powys's fiction Powys's novels Powysian present psychic quest Quetzalcoatl Ramón reader reading reality rebirth reprint Ridge scene seems sense soul spirit story suggest things thought tion turn Ulysses University Uryen vision Welsh Weymouth Sands Wilson Knight Wizzie Wolf Solent Wolf's word writing
Popular passages
Page 181 - ... books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
Page 250 - Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
Page 39 - It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
Page 254 - We travel not for trafficking alone : By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned: For lust of knowing what should not be known We make the golden journey to Samarkand.
Page 247 - And ask of thee forgiveness : so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news ; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins ; who's in, who's out...
Page 74 - What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.