Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies) - Softcover

Furlani, Andre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810123894 ISBN 13: 9780810123892

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Guy Davenport (1927-2005), an American writer of fiction, poetry, criticism, and essays, a translator, painter, intellectual, and teacher, brought a breadth and depth of knowledge to his pursuits that few other writers could approach, let alone appraise. In Andre Furlani, this twentieth-century American master has finally found an apt critical reader. In this first sustained critical study of Davenport, Furlani elucidates the depths of Davenport's fiction and its poetic precedents, brings a rare understanding to the author's reworking of twentieth-century literature and intellectual history, and offers unusual insight into his compositional technique.

Furlani explores key themes across the spectrum of Davenport's fiction: pastoral utopia; twentieth-century dystopia; sexual ethics; the mythologizing of childhood; the inseparability of the archaic and the modern; and a celebration of the union of sophia, eros, and poesia. Whether Davenport's view of art and the cosmos should be called "postmodern" is a question that Furlani considers closely--offering, finally, a new aesthetic for this American original who, in these pages, at last receives the thorough and meticulous attention he has long merited.

About this title

About the Author:

Andre Furlani is an associate professor in the English department at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

Review:

"Furlani's scholarship is overall remarkable. His is a notable contribution to the key, fast expanding field of postmodern studies and contemporary humanities broadly; in particular it renders justice to a largely under-read yet very important, representative writer." -Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0810123894
• ISBN 13: 9780810123892
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296