In the Spirit of Powys: New Essays

Front Cover
Denis 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.

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Contents

John Cowper Powys and James Joyce
23
Meditative Thoughts on Wolf Solent as Ineffable History
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
Copyright

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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.

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