Understanding Anthony Powell (Understanding Contemporary British Literature)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Suggesting that the literary world is just beginning to realize the extent of Anthony Powell￯﾿ﾽs achievements, Nicholas Birns provides a fresh examination of the British writer￯﾿ﾽs career and growing reputation in this introduction to his work. Birns takes a global view of Powell￯﾿ﾽs corpus, situating his works in context and explaining his place among Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Henry Green, in the second generation of British modernists. Birns adds to the understanding of how Powell and his compatriots pioneered a ￯﾿ﾽnext wave￯﾿ﾽ modernism in which experimentation and traditional narrative combined in a sustainable mode. Birns offers readings of Powell￯﾿ﾽs entire oeuvre, including the novels Afternoon Men, Venusberg, and The Fisher King, and his journals, which appeared in print between 1995 and 1997. Looking especially closely at A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve-volume sequence of novels that is Powell￯﾿ﾽs masterpiece, Birns sets the series in its social and historical context, emphasizing the role that both world wars and the cold war played in Powell￯﾿ﾽs life and writing. He makes a particular study of the novel￯﾿ﾽs dominating force￯﾿ﾽthe arrogant, opportunistic Widmerpool, a social climber who delights in his own good fortune and gloats over the sufferings of others. While noting Widmerpool￯﾿ﾽs central position, Birns illumines Powell￯﾿ﾽs subtle aesthetic resistance, epitomized by minor characters and the voice of the narrator, against Widmerpool and his ilk. Birns shows that instead of setting forth a single champion against evil, Powell subtly communicates a half-melancholy, half-humorous sensibility in which he invites the reader to share.   Author bio: NICHOLAS BIRNS teaches humanities at New School University in New York City. He completed his undergraduate work at Wesleyan University and Columbia University and received his doctorate from New York University. His work has been published in Arizona Quarterly, Hollins Critic, and the New York Times Book Review. A founding member of the Anthony Powell Society, Birns lives in New York City.

SYNOPSIS

Birns (humanities, New School U., New York City) draws on academic work about Powell largely though not exclusively in the US. He is particularly interested in his place in the overall course of the novel during the 20th century, as well as the historical background to his achievement. He bypasses the frequent comparison to Proust and the widely known references and allusions to earlier literary texts, except when they reveal something pivotal in Powell's own work. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Richard Maxwell

Nicholas Birns's new book on Anthony Powell offers many pleasures. It includes illuminating discussions of Powell's often-ignored early novels; it analyzes the form of the novel-sequence with great insight and tact; and it provides by far the best account of Powell's journals, as well as highly persuasive discussion of how to read journals, generically. Above all, it provides a close but agile novel-by-novel reading of Powell's great Dance to the Music of Time, which remains, despite a core of loyal readers, one of the more underrated landmarks of twentieth-century fiction. — Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University