The Collected Works of Kenneth White Volume 1: Underground to Otherground

306 pages. CONTENTS : Incandescent Limbo Letters from Gourgounel Travels in the Drifting Dawn. The three books contained in this first volume of Kenneth White's Collected Works present the beginnings of one of the most radical and exhilarating figures in modern literature. Incandescent Limbo recounts White's years in Paris. Many a writer in the modern era had made Paris a focal point of his or her activity, but probably no one made more of it or got more out of it than Kenneth White. While exploring a labyrinthine underworld, the book is fundamentally an autoanalysis and traces the birth of the writer as an intellectual nomad. Letters from Gourgounel takes us from the city to a wild part of south-eastern France, the Ardèche, where White undertakes a resourcing in an elementary context. Hailed in England as a 'fascinating curiosity of literature', this book not only made White famous overnight in France, it was seen there as a turning point in the contemporary situation. In a third book, Travels in the Drifting Dawn, the intellectual nomad begins his moves across territories and cultures. After passing through the London underground of the sixties, then delving into the ground of his native Scotland and neighbouring Ireland, we shift back to the Continent, accumulating experience on different levels in France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, before concluding the cycle in North Africa. The trilogy is not only a summary of White's itinerary in its initial stages, it opens up a whole intellectual and cultural programme.…