16 Prater Violet (Christopher Isherwood)

B-Side Books ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 98-102
Author(s):  
Stephen McCauley
Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker

This innovative book examines the development of modernism in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Focusing upon how literary and cultural outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect, mood, and literary geography to offer an original account of the geographical emotions of modernism. It considers three broad features of urban modernism: the built environment of the particular cities, such as cafés or transport systems; the cultural institutions of publishing that underpinned the development of modernism in these locations; and the complex perceptions of writers and artists who were outsiders to the four cities. Particular attention is thus given to the transnational qualities of modernism by examining figures whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles, or strangers. The writers and artists discussed include Mulk Raj Anand, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bryher, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selon, and Stephen Spender.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322
Author(s):  
Mario Faraone

Throughout his life, Christopher Isherwood explored his sense of himself through a range of different genres of writing: autobiography, letters and journals, and fiction. The polysemic image of the mirror plays a major role in the structuring of his novels and other writings. Through the figure of the mirror, the writer signals many nearly imperceptible yet significant changes over time. This article explores this image in a range of Isherwood’s writings, and argues that, through its deployment, the artist very often questions himself about the dichotomy between appearance and reality. The presence of the mirror in the early writings assumes modalities which are distinct from those belonging to the conversion period to Vedanta, the Hindu-oriented philosophy and religion.


1998 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-128
Author(s):  
Sara S. Hodson

1984 ◽  
pp. 47-51
Author(s):  
P. J. E. Hyams ◽  
H. Chr. Wekker

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-173
Author(s):  
Ashley Maher

Though the cross-medium modern style advocated by Herbert Read and Stephen Spender aimed to bring good design to political as well as aesthetic structures, the Ministry of Information mobilized modernist rhetoric for propaganda during World War II. British authors such as Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas scripted films promoting the “new Britain” to be achieved through architecture-led revolution, yet the politicization of style and wartime fears of double agents meant that Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, and Christopher Isherwood turned the intense focus on style to their own work. Bowen used the “swastika arms of passage leading to nothing” of the mock-Tudor Holme Dene to scrutinize her memory-laden, late modernist writing, while Orwell and Isherwood directed their attention to streamlined glass and steel structures to contemplate the potential duplicity of their seemingly candid vernacular style.


The Hangover ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 171-218
Author(s):  
Jonathon Shears

Chapter 6 explores the way the hangover is used in drinking narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to understand the figure of the existential, drunken outsider. It considers the ways in which the most defiant of rebellious figures are undermined by the physical and emotional assault of the hangover. The chapter looks at the different kinds of scrutiny that male and female problem drinkers come to bear, usually in relation to sexual conduct, and the increased presence of inexplicable ‘hangxiety’, often less easily defined than related emotions such as shame and guilt. There is close analysis of fiction from the US and the UK, including works by Jack London, Alan Sillitoe, Christopher Isherwood, Jean Rhys, Charles Bukowski, Helen Fielding and A. L. Kennedy. The chapter concludes by arguing that memory loss is perhaps the most compelling way in which the rebellious outside can cheat the socio-cultural determinants of a Traditional-Punishment response.


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