The poet David Gascoyne (1916-2001) led a life as surreal as his early poems. At eighteen he drafted the manifesto of the English Surrealist Group and at nineteen he published what remains an authoritative account of the international movement. He translated for Salvador Dali and crossed swords with Andre Breton; the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London was largely his brainchild. During the war he toured as an actor, embraced religious existentialism and became, in the words of John Lehmann, "the most important philosophic poet of our time." After the war he wrote for radio, painted, cooked, and went mad. The journals he kept during his periods of mental instability are masterpieces of the bizarre. Gascoyne found unexpected happiness in late middle age, emerging as an elder statesman of British poetry. Robert Fraser contends that, through all the twists and turns of his variegated existence, Gascoyne strove for candour and truth of self-expression. With equivalent candour this pioneering biography describes his creative work and multifarious translations, his inconvenient addictions, his tormented private life, and his many friendships in England and in France.

Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne

Biographies & Memoirs

FRASER, ROBERT

Arts & Literature

Oxford University Press

This surprising study draws together the disparate fields of postcolonial theory and book history in a challenging and illuminating way.  Robert Fraser proposes that we now look beyond the traditional methods of the Anglo-European bibliographic paradigm, and learn to appreciate instead the diversity of shapes that verbal expression has assumed across different societies. This change of attitude will encourage students and researchers to question developmentally conceived models of communication, and move instead to a re-formulation of just what is meant by a book, an author, a text. Fraser illustrates his combined approach with comparative case studies of print, script and speech cultures in South Asia and Africa, before panning out to examine conflicts and paradoxes arising in parallel contexts. The re-orientation of approach and the freshness of view offered by this volume will foster understanding and creative collaboration between scholars of different outlooks, while offering a radical critique to those identified in its concluding section as purveyors of global literary power.

Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes: Re-Writing the Script

Routledge

Where does the book belong? Does it enshrine the soul of a nation, or is it a means by which nations talk to one another, sharing ideas, technologies, texts? This book, the first in a two-volume set of original essays, responds to these questions with archive-based case studies of print culture in a number of countries around the world.

Books Without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture

Literature & Fiction

Hammond, Mary

Essays & Correspondence

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

This Island Place

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd.

Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script

History & Criticism

This surprising study draws together the disparate fields of postcolonial theory and book history in a challenging and illuminating way. Robert Fraser proposes that we now look beyond the traditional methods of the Anglo-European bibliographic paradigm, and learn to appreciate instead the diversity of shapes that verbal expression has assumed across different societies. This change of attitude will encourage students and researchers to question developmentally conceived models of communication, and move instead to a re-formulation of just what is meant by a book, an author, a text. Fraser illustrates his combined approach with comparative case studies of print, script and speech cultures in South Asia and Africa, before panning out to examine conflicts and paradoxes arising in parallel contexts. The re-orientation of approach and the freshness of view offered by this volume will foster understanding and creative collaboration between scholars of different outlooks, while offering a radical critique to those identified in its concluding section as purveyors of global literary power.

Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes

Previous studies of African poetry have tended to concentrate either on its political content or on its relationship to various European schools. This book examines West African poetry in English and French against the background of oral poetry in the vernacular. Do the roots of such poetry lie in Africa or in Europe? In committing their work to writing, do poets lose more than they gain? Can the immediacy of oral performance ever be recovered? Robert Fraser's account of two centuries of West African verse examines its subjugation to a succession of international styles: from the heroic couplet to the austerity of experimental Modernism. Successive chapters take us through the Négritude movement and the emergence of anglophone free verse in the 1950s to the rediscovery in recent years of the neglected springs of orality, which is the subject of the concluding chapter.

West African Poetry: A Critical History

Cambridge University Press

A major new series of practical science books which explain the basic principles of science through a careful balance of activities and information. The experiments are fun to do, require no special equipment and can be performed by children on their own or in groups.

The World Financial System (Keesing's Reference Publication)

Business & Money

Economics

Oryx Pr

The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Baker

The first biography of one of the finest and most bohemian British poets of the twentieth century.Eliot wrote of his "genius". Yeats thought him the most interesting poet of his generation. Dylan Thomas envied his power over women. This biography of George Barker (1913-91) offers both a portrait of a talented, tormented and irresistibly entertaining man, and a who's who of the British literary world in the 20th century.

The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker

Pimlico

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