The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image - Hardcover

Ziolkowski, Theodore

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691059071 ISBN 13: 9780691059075

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Immediately after World War I, four major European and American poets and thinkers--W. B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, R. M. Rilke, and C. G. Jung--moved into towers as their principal habitations. Taking this striking coincidence as its starting point, this book sets out to locate modern turriphilia in its cultural context and to explore the biographical circumstances that motivated the four writers to choose their unusual retreats. From the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia to the ivory towers of the fin de si cle, the author traces the emergence of a variety of symbolic associations with the proud towers of the past, ranging from spirituality and intellect to sexuality and sequestration.

But in every case the tower served both literally and symbolically as a refuge from the urban modernism with whose values the four writers found themselves at odds. While the classic modernists (Eliot, Woolf, Hart Crane) often singled out the broken tower as the image of a crumbling past, these writers actualized their powerful visions: Yeats and Rilke moved into medieval towers in Ireland and Switzerland, while Jeffers and Jung built themselves towers at Carmel and Bollingen as secluded spaces in which to cultivate the traditions and values they cherished. The last chapter traces this perseverance of the ancient image through its heyday in the twenties and into the present, where it has undergone renewal, institutionalization, and parody.

Originally published in 1998.

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About this title

From the Back Cover

"This is a fine study indeed. Ziolkowski makes a significant contribution to modern literary and cultural history and to the study of themes. I know of no comparable book, and since the work is presented free of jargon and in an elegant fashion, I believe that it will interest general readers, as well as specialists."--Werner Sollors, Harvard University

About the Author

Theodore Ziolkowski is Class of 1900 Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He has published nine previous books with Princeton University Press, including German Romanticism and Its Institutions, Virgil and the Moderns, and The Mirror of Justice.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0691059071
• ISBN 13: 9780691059075
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 217