JOHN COWPER POWYS
Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity Rethinking Powys: Critical Essays on John Cowper Powys Postmodern Powys Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited Sensualism and Mythology: The Wessex Novels of John Cowper Powys The Ecstasies of John Cowper Powys
BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST
Blinded By Her Light: The Love-Poetry of Robert Graves The Passion of D.H.Lawrence D.H. Lawrence: Infinite Sensual Violence D.H. Lawrence: Symbolic Landscapes Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure: A Critical Study Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Critical Study Love and Tragedy: A Study of Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels
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Henry Miller on John Cowper Powys:I had an unholy veneration for the man. Every word he uttered seemed to go right to the mark...John Cowper Powys was a rounded individual. He illumined whatever he touched, always relating it to the central fires which nourish the cosmos itself. He was an 'interpreter' (or poet) in the highest sense of the word... Were I to see a single adjective by which to summarize the wizardry of this author I should fasten on 'mantic'... For this author has not only the ability to sound the innermost depths, he can also reach beyond the stars. He has a polarity and a gamut which is almost terrifying.
Angus Wilson on John Cowper Powys:
[A Glastonbury Romance] had an electrifying effect upon me, for here speaking to me of the contemporary world (for I insist greatly upon the social exactitude of Powys's earlier novels) was a strange voice of an English Dostoevsky whose novels reproduced many of Dickens's ballets and who yet was unique.
Alyse Gregory on John Cowper Powys:
Of all the people I have known over a long lifetime, it is he, with all his malice dances and buffooneries, his phobias and obsessions, his proclaimed sadism and his invisible perversities, that most nearly approaches my idea of a great and good man. Faithful in friendship, magnanimous at all times, courageous in adversity, compassionate to the point of self-destruction, it is enough to have him in the room for life to lose its ordinary aspects, for the most apathetic mind to be suddenly wide awake, the most melancholy heart to yield up its burden.
New literary criticism by one of the leading Powys scholars. Harald Fawkner's lucid, provocative analysis focusses on love, sex, subjectivity and affectivity in Weymouth Sands and Owen Glendower.
H.W. Fawkner's previous books include Shakespeare's
Miracle Plays (1992), on Charles Dickens (1977), John Fowles (1984)
and the excellent Ecstatic World of John Cowper Powys (1986). Fawkner
regularly contributes to The Powys Journal, The Powys Review and
Powys Notes. He is Professor of English at the University of Stockholm.
John Cowper Powys Studies Series
Bibliography and notes 112pp 2nd ed. ISBN 1-86171-127-1
£10.00 / $20.00
To me all these re-visitings of Weymouth were attended with thoughts that, as Wordsworth says of the weight of custom, were "heavy as frost, and deep, almost, as life." There were certain moments when those pebbles opposite Brunswick Terrace seemed to contain a mystery that pressed upon my brain, they and the deep greenish-grey volume of inrolling waves that were so deep just there until I felt as though they belonged to a life within life. Hard round wet pebbles and transparent depths of water - what was the secret they held; and what was it that made their conjunction just there so peculiarly significant? And the smell there used to be between the outer door of Penn House and the inner door - a smell that had sand in it, and faint, just discernible fish-scales in it, and riband-seaweed, full of sensations totally distinct from any I was feeling at this later time, always come stealing over me again?(John Cowper Powys, writing about his beloved Weymouth, from the Autobiography)
A new collection of essays. H.W. Fawkner's
essay ìVenusî 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
Félix Guattari.
John Cowper Powys Studies Series
Bibliography and notes 110pp 2nd ed. ISBN 1-86171-167-0
£10.00 / $20.00
What I am revealing to you now is the deepest and most essential secret of my life. My thoughts were lost in my sensations; and my sensations were of a kind so difficult to describe that I could write a volume upon them and still not really have put them down. But the field-dung upon my boots, the ditch-mud plastered thick, with little bits of dead grass in it, against the turned-up ends of my trousers, the feel of my oak-stick "Sacred" whose every indentation and corrugation and curve I knew as well as those on my hand, the salty taste of half-dried sweat upon my lips, the delicious swollenness of my fingers, the sullen sweet weariness of my legs, the indescribable happiness of my calm, dazed, lulled, wind-drugged, air-drunk spirit, were all, after their kind, a sort of thinking, though of exactly what, it would be very hard for me to explain.(John Cowper Powys, from Autobiography)
New Essays on John Cowper Powys, including a postmodern reading of Powys via G. Wilson Knight, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Baudrillard and Gianni Vattimo; Wolf Solent, parody and postmodern fiction; Jacques Derrida and deauthorization in Powys's Autobiography; and Owen Glendower and Walter Scott.
Joe Boulter is Senior Scholar at Somerville
College, Oxford.
John Cowper Powys Studies Series
Bibliography and notes 110pp 2nd ed. ISBN 1-86171-178-6
£10.00 / $20.00
I touch here upon what is to me one of the profoundest philosophical mysteries: I mean the power of the individual mind to create its own world, not in complete independence of what is called "the objective world," but in a steadily growing independent attitude of other minds towards this world. [...] The point is that we have the power of re-creating the universe from the depths of ourselves. In doing so we share the creative force that started the whole process.(John Cowper Powys, from Autobiography)
Both Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys created a poetic Wessex landscape. Hardy's Wessex has entered popular folklore and myth, and is used in the promotion of holidays, walks, tours, museums, hotels, even town councils. John Cowper Powys's Wessex, in A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands, among other novels, is less well-known: a place of secret corners, mossy walls, ancient earthworks, Somerset wetlands and ferny hollows. Both writers are discussed thematically for their sense of nature, mythology, philosophy, painting, sensualism, labour, folklore and the family. D.H.Lawrence is referenced throughout as a bridge between Hardy and Powys. Finally Robinson considers the film versions of Hardy's novels. This is a valuable addition to the criticism of Hardy and Powys.
Jeremy Robinson's books include Glorification:
Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur
Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain:
Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion
and Pagan America (a journal of America poetry).
Thomas Hardy Studies Series
Bibliography, notes, index and illustrations 151pp. ISBN 1-871846-67-6
£19.99 / $32.00
But scarcely had these vapour-ghosts vanished from before him than a deep, narrow, crimson streak - as if it had been a bloody scar in an ashen-grey forehead - appeared just above the horizon; and simultaneously with this blood-line which made him think of the decapitated eel, the long saurian neck of St. Alban's Head, like some antediluvian sea-serpent, manifested itself on the horizon. and even as he looked at it, this red streak on the sea's rim, that was like a long thin trail of rusty blood that slowly incarnadined as the sun, melted it from behind the world, changed its nature, and became crimson, and with it a galaxy of small feathery clouds that had been floating unnoticed in the eastern sky caught this glory and bloomed over the water like a towering cascade of gigantic rose-petals. But as if the boy had been hypnotized into making a leap forward over some time-gulf, he suddenly realized, without catching Nature at her conjuring trick, that the whole eastern sky, and the whole horizon of the sea, too, had lost its crimson and become shining gold.(John Cowper Powys, from Weymouth Sands, describing the Dorset coastline around St Aldhelm's Head, illustrated above)
An appraisal of one of England's great but unsung authors. Looks at his quartet of West Country books of the 1930s, Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle. The huge Welsh novels, Owen Glendower and Porius, are also discussed. The emphasis is on Powys' mythic life-philosophy, his visionary sense of landscape, and the links with his literary forebears: Dostoievsky, Rabelais, Homer, Shakespeare.
Jeremy Robinson's books include Glorification:
Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur
Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain:
Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion
and Pagan America (a journal of America poetry).
John Cowper Powys Series Bibliography,
notes 60pp ISBN 1-871846-70-6 £8.49 / $13.50
The magic of the moment, the scent of the primroses and the damp moss, the tremulous ecstasy of the birds and insects, the unusual greenness that washed up against their feet like a wave of the primal sap of creation, covered them now as a couple of early violets might be covered, by lush transparent overgrowths that guard and enhance their poignant breath.(John Cowper Powys, from A Glastonbury Romance)
A study of the ecstatic fiction of John Cowper Powys, one of the wildest and strangest voices in modern literature.
'An intelligent and wide-ranging survey,
which both examines the importance of the notion of ecstasy in Powys's
work and relates this to an astonishing range of authors and cultural practices
and beliefs.' (The Powys Society Newsletter)
John Cowper Powys Series With bibliography
and notes. 161pp ISBN 1-86171-029-1 £14.99
/ $23.50
In one warm inrushing wave the fragrance of the whole West-country seemed to flow through him as he came forth. Sap-sweet emanations from the leafy recesses of all the Dorset woods on that side of High Stoy seemed to mingle at that moment with the rank, grassy breath of all the meadow-lands of Somerset. The iron railings in front of that row of meagre, nondescript houses opened upon the airy confluence of two vast provinces of leafiness and sunshine - to the right Melbury Bub, with its orchards and dairies; to the left Glastonbury Tor, with its pastures and fens - while the umbrageous ëaurasí of these two regions, blending together in the air above the roofs of Blacksod, merged into yet a third essence, an essence sweeter than either - the very soul of the whole wide land lying between the English Channel and the Bristol Channel.(John Cowper Powys, from Wolf Solent)
It was incredibly lovely! Blue sky - wind blowing - diffused rainbows - the white clouds visible throí a vapour of Irised light all flowing & fluctuatingÖ The whole sky was a rainbow wind-blown waterfall, interspersed with blue. Up there the Reservoir was dark blue - lapis-lazuli - & round it all tall wind-tost yellow Ragwort & masses of Rose-Bay! The grey rocks dotted with pale purple Ling which is now the flourishing heather & interspersed by a few plants of bell-heather & its brown dead bells. Those green ferns, so narrow, glittering with diamonds of dew & I heard two Grouse crying crossly ëGet away! Get away! Get away!í The hills towards Ruthin stood out beautiful.
(John Cowper Powys in his diary of early September 1936, describing a walk in the mountains of Merionethshire)
To read extracts from the above books,
click on the links below:
Robert Graves, who died in 1985, is one of Britain's best love-poets, though he was first known as a war poet and author of Goodbye to All That and later the I, Claudius novels. This book focuses on his highly individual love-poetry, which is marked by lucidity, passion and freshness. The author relates the poetry to the central Gravesian concerns of the White Goddess; the magical landscapes; the role of the true, dedicated poet; the concept of Muse-poetry; his relations with Laura Riding; the Single Poetic Theme of the Goddess and Her consort, the dying god; and the mythological surveys, in particular The White Goddess and The Greek Myths. Throughout the book Graves is set alongside the erotic poetry traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, Sufism, courtly love, Elizabethan and Romantic poetry. His poetic oeuvre is compared with Petrarch's Rime Sparse and Shakespeare's Sonnets, as well as the English poetic tradition: Skelton, Donne, Keats, Hardy, Eliot and Yeats. The author also discusses Graves' associations with symbolism, witchcraft, mythology, folklore and psychology. All the major poems are featured in this important contribution to Graves studies. This is the only study of the whole of Graves' late love-poetry available.
Jeremy Robinson's books include Glorification:
Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur
Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain:
Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion
and Pagan America (a journal of America poetry).
Bibliography, notes 161pp ISBN
1-871846-11-0 £14.99 / $23.50
This book explores why the fiction of D.H. Lawrence continues to fascinate critics and delight readers. With television and film adaptions being churned out (notably by Ken Russell), biographies and feminist tracts being written, and much pious chattering in the media about the Lady Chatterley trial, D.H. Lawrence's work remains as topical as ever.
Jeremy Robinson's books include Glorification:
Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur
Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain:
Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion
and Pagan America (a journal of America poetry).
With notes and bibliography. 140pp ISBN 1-871846-36-6 £14.99 / $23.50
'Infinite sensual violence' is one of the
phrases Lawrence employs in his two great novels, The Rainbow and
Women in Love which, with Lady Chatterley's Lover, form the
heart of this study of love, emotion, sexuality, gender, identity and feminism
in Lawrence's work. Pace sees Lawrence as still today one of the most challenging
of writers, whose provocative, angry and sometimes simplistic ideas polarize
critics and feminists.
Bibliography, notes ISBN 1-898283-13-3 124pp £14.99 / $23.50
D.H. Lawrence's The Escaped Cock
This book analyzes the rich discourses
of mythology, symbolism, form, eroticism and landscape in D.H.Lawrence's
fiction. Foster traces Lawrence's symbols (tigers, suns, fish, peacocks)
in many of the short stories, as well as the major novels. 'Spirit of place'
was always important for Lawrence, and Foster's study investigates how
Lawrence's concept of place informed his fiction, poetry and travel books.
Bibliography, notes, 121pp ISBN 1-898283-22-2
£14.99 / $23.50
There are surprisingly few feminist analyses of Hardy, and most do not get beyond vague notions of sexism and misogynism, in the Kate Millett manner. Elvy's book, however, uses up-to-date research in the fields of cultural studies, feminist poetics, gay, lesbian and queer theory. This new, postmodern and incisive exploration of Hardy offers an exciting and radical reappraisal of the discourses of gender, desire, class, economy, socialization, identity and patriarchy in his fiction and poetry.
Margaret Elvy is assistant professor, Dept
of English, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written
books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three
books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure,
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas
Hardy and Feminism).
Thomas Hardy Studies Series
Extensive bibliography and notes 195pp ISBN 1-871846-93-5
£14.99 / $23.50
She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess... She had Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries... The mouth, seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver than to kiss... Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in 'Athalie'; her motions, the ebbs and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola.... Her appearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, and the shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the sad and stifled warmth within her. A true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow...(Thomas Hardy, from The Return of the Native)
Sexing Hardy
Feminism and Gender Studies in the Work of Thomas Hardy
(new edition)
This new edition includes a new introduction
and a new bibliography.
Extensive bibliography and notes
188pp ISBN 1-86171-065-8 £15.99 / $25.00
Hardy's last, great novel is lucidly analyzed employing up-to-date developments in gender, feminist and cultural studies. Sue Bridehead is reinstated as central to the novel, and to Hardy's bitter, polemical attack on the institutions of marriage, religion, education, sexuality, identity, gender and politics.
Margaret Elvy is assistant professor, Dept
of English, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written
books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three
books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure,
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas
Hardy and Feminism).
Thomas Hardy Studies Series
Bibliography and notes 143pp ISBN 1-86171-007-0
£14.99 / $23.50
A detailed and incisive analysis of Hardy's classic novel, using the latest research in feminism, gay, lesbian and queer theory, and cultural studies. Elvy offers a thorough reappraisal of Hardy's favourite heroine. She incorporates much of recent Hardy criticism, in which Hardy has been reappraised in the light of materialist, psychoanalytic, gender, poststructuralist and feminist criticism.
Margaret Elvy is assistant professor, Dept
of English, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written
books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three
books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure,
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas
Hardy and Feminism).
Thomas Hardy Studies Series
Bibliography and notes 132pp ISBN 1-86171-006-2
£14.99 / $23.50
"I have done it... He had come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it anymore. I never loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you... Why did you go away - why did you - when I loved you so? ...I could not bear the loss of you any longer - you don't know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband; say you do, now I have killed him!"(Thomas Hardy, from Tess of the d'Urbervilles)
The discourses of societal oppression,
sexual repression, love, education, identity, pain and tragedy, myth and
religion are Thomas Hardy's main themes. This lucid analysis of Hardy's
ethics begins with the major novels and ends with an investigation of Hardy's
philosophy. Not a pessimist or a 'negative' thinker, Hardy emerges as a
socially committed realist, who saw that much of the pain of life is created
by people, not necessarily by 'fate', time, circumstance, luck, chance
or the world.
Thomas Hardy Studies Series
Bibliography, notes, 121pp ISBN 1-871846-40-4
£14.99 / $23.50
Love, sexuality, gender, identity, politics, marriage and tragedy are the main discourses analyzed here, from a feminist perspective. Spenser reappraises Hardy's key texts (the five novels Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native) and employs the latest methodologies of feminist and cultural theory.
Tom Spenser is a poet and critic. His poetry
books include Borderlands (1994) and Be-coming (1991). He
has written a biography of John Keats (1986) and a collection of essays
on poets such as Sappho, Catullus, Tasso and Neruda (Romantic Configurations,
1984). He lives near Abbotsbury, Dorset.
Thomas Hardy Studies Series
Index, bibliography, notes. 160pp ISBN 1-871846-07-2
£14.99 / $23.50
John Cowper Powys - full-length book
New collections of essays on John Cowper
Powys
Henry Miller
JOHN COWPER POWYS
Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity Rethinking Powys: Critical Essays on John Cowper Powys Postmodern Powys Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited Sensualism and Mythology: The Wessex Novels of John Cowper Powys The Ecstasies of John Cowper Powys
BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST
Blinded By Her Light: The Love-Poetry of Robert Graves The Passion of D.H.Lawrence D.H. Lawrence: Infinite Sensual Violence D.H. Lawrence: Symbolic Landscapes Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure: A Critical Study Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Critical Study Love and Tragedy: A Study of Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels
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Andy Goldsworthy | Art | Art in Close-Up Series | Sculpture | Painters | American Painters | Renaissance Painters | Renaissance Writers | J.R.R. Tolkien | Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling | Cinema | Media, Cinema, Culture, Feminism | Feminism and Gender Studies | Literature | Poetry | Contemporary Poetry | Novelists | 19th Century and Romantic Culture | European Writers | British Poets | Shakespeare Studies | Arthur Rimbaud Studies | D.H. Lawrence Studies | John Cowper Powys Studies | Thomas Hardy Studies | Journals | Alchemy Records | Index of Titles, ISBNs, Dates and Prices | New Titles and Forthcoming Books | TV arts documentaries on DVD and video