Here & Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke

Kenneth Burke; Introduction by Denis Donoghue

ISBN 10: 1574232010 / ISBN 13: 9781574232011

Published by David R. Godine, Publisher, 2005

About this Item

Stated First Edition. A Black Sparrow Book. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread in NEW condition. "Before he turned to criticism and became the American Coleridge, Kenneth Burke was a writer of fiction. His avant-garde short stories were unlike any others of the 1920s; indeed, stories even remotely like them would not come along for decades. Not for Burke the stripped-down language of Hemingway or the topical social satire of Fitzgerald; instead he was intent on constructing rhetorically gorgeous 'peopled essays' that anticipated, by nearly half a century, the work of Calvino, Gass and Nicholson Baker. More precisely, Burke appropriated for modernism the forgotten formal modes---and the bawdy comic verve---of Tristram Shandy and Candide. His characters are thinkers, not doers; they lament, rejoice, beseech, admonish, aphorize, and inveigh in the manner of a Greenwich Village Samuel Johnson. The centerpiece is TOWARDS A BETTER LIFE (1932), a series of grave, malicious epistles by John Neal, a worldly ascetic and philosophical dandy." Pristine copy w/sharp corners & crisp edges, square binding, no creases in spine. Quite presentable.

Seller Inventory # RUB954

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Here & Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke
• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1574232010
• ISBN 13: 9781574232011
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The gorgeous, brilliant essay-stories of Kenneth Burke were unlike any other fiction of the 1920s. Here & Elsewhere gathers, for the first time, all of Burke’s fiction: 23 short stories and Towards a Better Life, which Denis Donoghue calls “one of my favorite novels, full of sentences so luminous that I could be easily persuaded that style is everything.”

About the Authors

Kenneth Burke published in and edited prominent literary magazines and taught at colleges across the country. His work in literary criticism received numerous accolades, including the 1981 National Medal for Literature at the American Book Awards.

Denis Donoghue is the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University. He was born in Ireland and educated at University College Dublin and the University of Cambridge.