James Knowlson: Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996)

“Samuel Beckett’s long-standing friend, James Knowlson, recreates Beckett’s youth in Ireland, his studies at Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1920s and from there to the Continent, where he plunged into the multicultural literary society of late-1920s Paris. The biography throws new light on Beckett’s stormy relationship with his mother, the psychotherapy he received after the death of his father and his crucial relationship with James Joyce. There is also material on Beckett’s six-month visit to Germany as the Nazi’s tightened their grip.

The book includes unpublished material on Beckett’s personal life after he chose to live in France, including his own account of his work for a Resistance cell during the war, his escape from the Gestapo and his retreat into hiding.

Obsessively private, Beckett was wholly committed to the work which eventually brought his public fame, beginning with the controversial success of Waiting for Godot in 1953, and culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.”

Publisher Bloomsbury, London, 1996
ISBN 0747527199
872 pages
via kmamdani

Reviews: Prendergast (London Review of Books, 1996), O’Hara (The New York Review of Books, 1996), Sipper (Los Angeles Times, 1996), Brown (European Review, 1997), Hutchings (World Literature Today, 1997).

Publisher
WorldCat

EPUB, EPUB (9 MB)

Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound: Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1919–)

“First published in 1919 by Ezra Pound, Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written language has become one of the most often quoted statements in the history of American poetics. As edited by Pound, it presents a powerful conception of language that continues to shape our poetic and stylistic preferences: the idea that poems consist primarily of images; the idea that the sentence form with active verb mirrors relations of natural force. But previous editions of the essay represent Pound’s understanding—it is fair to say, his appropriation—of the text. Fenollosa’s manuscripts, in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, allow us to see this essay in a different light, as a document of early, sustained cultural interchange between North America and East Asia.

Pound’s editing of the essay obscured two important features, here restored to view: Fenollosa’s encounter with Tendai Buddhism and Buddhist ontology, and his concern with the dimension of sound in Chinese poetry.

This book is the definitive critical edition of Fenollosa’s important work. After a substantial Introduction, the text as edited by Pound is presented, together with his notes and plates. At the heart of the edition is the first full publication of the essay as Fenollosa wrote it, accompanied by the many diagrams, characters, and notes Fenollosa (and Pound) scrawled on the verso pages. Pound’s deletions, insertions, and alterations to Fenollosa’s sometimes ornate prose are meticulously captured, enabling readers to follow the quasi-dialogue between Fenollosa and his posthumous editor. Earlier drafts and related talks reveal the developmentof Fenollosa’s ideas about culture, poetry, and translation. Copious multilingual annotation is an important feature of the edition.”

Critical edition
Edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein
Publisher Fordham University Press, 2008.
ISBN 0823228681, 9780823228683
240 pages

Reviews: Armstrong (Sign Language Studies, 2009), Nicholls (Modernism/modernity, 2010), Beam (Oyster Boy Review, 2012).
Commentary: Williams (2009).

Publisher (2008)

Fenollosa’s documents in the Beinecke Library.
Version published in The Little Review, 1919: 6:5 (Sep 1919), 62-64, 6:6 (Oct 1919), 57-64, 6:7 (Nov 1919), 55-60, 6:8 (Dec 1919), 68-72 (at Index of Modernist Magazines).
Version printed in Instigations, 1920, 357-388 (at Internet Archive), HTML (at Project Gutenberg).
Critical edition, 2008: EPUB.

Fionnghuala Sweeney, Kate Marsh (eds.): Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, Haiti and the Avant-garde (2013)

“This collection of ten essays makes a persuasive case for a black Atlantic literary renaissance and its impact on modernist studies. The chapters stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. This is the first book-length publication to explore the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and the first study to address together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.”

Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2013
ISBN 074864640X, 9780748646401
264 pages

Review: Dominic Thomas (French Studies, 2013).

Publisher
WorldCat

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