Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature

by Hugh Kenner

Overview

The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts its shadow, and Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature represents, in its author s words, a report on ten years watching of shadows. Collecting the earliest short essays and reviews by a man who was arguably the greatest English-language critic-scholar of the twentieth century, Gnomon not only provides valuable, entertaining, and often scabrous insights into the workings of literature, as well as the books of such modern giants as William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, but is itself a cross-section of the development of Kenner s own body of work, which in its beauty, irreverence, and disregard for convention proves him as much an artist as the men and women he spent his life championing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564784308
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	02/26/2016
Series:	Coleman Dowell American Literature Series
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) was one of America's great literary critics. He wrote on a range of subjects that includes Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and geodesic domes.

Table of Contents

Foreword 3

1 The Sacred Book of the Arts 9

2 A Note on The Great American Novel 30

3 With the Bare Hands 38

4 Dr. Williams Shaping His Axe 55

5 Whitman's Multitudes 67

6 Faces to the Wall 80

7 Subways to Parnassus 101

8 Tales of the Vienna Woods 114

9 Provision of Measures 132

10 Remember That I Have Remembered 144

11 Conrad and Ford 162

12 In the Wake of the Anarch 171

13 Supreme in Her Abnormality 180

14 At the Hawk's Well 198

15 The Devil and Wyndham Lewis 215

16 Inside the Featherbed 242

17 Alice in Empsonland 249

18 Ezra Pound and the Light of France 263

19 Under the Larches of Paradise 280

Index 297

Editorial Reviews

It’s always an unexpected pleasure to find serious literary criticism written as if the English language still mattered, as Hugh Kenner’s writing insists that it does.

T. R. Edwards - The New York Times Book Review

There is no critic who has more firmly established his claim to valuable literary property than has Kenner to the first three decades of the twentieth century in England. Author of previous studies of Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pound (to name a few), Kenner bestrides modern literature if not like a colossus then at least a presence of formidable proportions.

The New York Times