CUSHING, FRANK HAMILTON; GREEN, JESSE (EDITOR & INTRODUCTION); EGGAN, FRED (FOREWORD):Zuni: Selected Writings Of Frank Hamilton Cushing
- gebunden oder broschiert 1979, ISBN: 9780803221000
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London England: 2011. Hardcover with dustjacket. Brand new book. Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young London… Mehr…
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London England: 2011. Hardcover with dustjacket. Brand new book. Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England's greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens's early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel. It was a high-stakes gamble, and Dickens never forgot how differently things could have turned out. Like the hero of Dombey and Son, he remained haunted by "what might have been, and what was not." In his own lifetime, Dickens was without rivals. He styled himself simply "The Inimitable." But he was not always confident about his standing in the world. From his traumatized childhood to the suicide of his first collaborator and the sudden death of the woman who had a good claim to being the love of his life, Dickens faced powerful obstacles. Before settling on the profession of novelist, he tried his hand at the law and journalism, considered a career in acting, and even contemplated emigrating to the West Indies. Yet with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and a groundbreaking series of plays, sketches, and articles, he succeeded in turning every potential breakdown into a breakthrough. Douglas-Fairhurst's provocative new biography, focused on the 1830s, portrays a restless and uncertain Dickens who could not decide on the career path he should take and would never feel secure in his considerable achievements. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is Fellow and Tutor in English, Magdalen College, Oxford. * 2011 Duff Cooper Prize * An Irish Times Book of the Year, 2011 * A Library Journal Best Book of 2011 * A New Statesman Book of the Year, 2011 * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, 2011 * A Sunday Times Best Book of 2011 * A Telegraph Best Book 2011 * A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2011 * A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year, 2011 "We learn why Dickens wrote the way he did and why it resonated so much with readers of the time. And though this is closely tied to social change in the industrial age, Douglas-Fairhurst neatly sidesteps tired, modern-day rants about class tension, diving right to the human element of the matterÉ Douglas-Fairhurst's immersive approach to Dickens has one striking effect: scattering Dickensian plot notes all over the place like gumdrops, he makes you want to read Dickens's original text. For those who never found Dickens the most compelling of authors, even of nineteenth-century authors (yours truly included) Douglas-Fairhurst provides plenty of reasons to take a second look&helilp; The Douglas-Fairhurst biography is, if nothing else, a brilliant vindication of textual analysisÉ Douglas-Fairhurst [is writing] the story of the writerÑbut in probing the novelist's writings, Douglas-Fairhurst might wind up getting closer to the man than the traditional biographer does; conceivably, to understand an artist's life and humanity, you're better off going straight to his art."ÑHeather Horn, The Atlantic online "A convincing portrait of budding genius."ÑBryce Christensen, Booklist "Douglas-Fairhurst explores how Dickens's evolution from impoverished child to middle-class professional shaped his artistic development and gave him unique insight into the Victorian zeitgeist. Characters like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are windows into the vibrant, tumultuous period that made Dickens possible. Their triumphs and travails feel real because they mirror the author's own difficult adolescenceÉ Becoming Dickens is not just the biography of a man; it's about the birth of a particular way of life, which provided fertile ground for artistic triumphs that still resonate today. It's a reminder that talent, however great, cannot thrive in a world in which the avenues of growth are reserved for the privileged."ÑMichael Patrick Brady, The Boston Globe "Readers familiar with the entirety of Dickens will find this book a remarkable achievement. Those who know the early works and the great biographiesÉwill find it a revelationÉ Putting to rest the myths of Dickens as an overnight sensation or a traumatized child who secretly mastered his past, Douglas-Fairhurst brings into clear view the singular improbability of Dickens's becoming a novelist."ÑN. Lukacher, Choice "Original and elegantÉDouglas-Fairhurst, who has every line ever written by Dickens at his fingertips, inhabits them; he shows us the internal process of the writing, revealing the hidden jokes, the coded messages, the ways in which 'the most central and eccentric literary figure of the age' wove his other selves into his texts."ÑFrances Wilson, The Daily Telegraph "Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sets out to counter what he sees as the literary man-of-destiny version of Dickens, to recover the uncertainty, muddle and loose endsÉ Douglas-Fairhurst covers much ground, but one of his central ideas is Dickens's pervasive sense of what might have been. He sees it in the false trails and shadow plots (take Great Expectations, where Pip imagines himself in one story though is really in another), in his doublings among characters and in his jostling possibilities and competing outcomes (for instance in A Christmas Carol). Becoming Dickens is an ingenious, playful and often brilliant analysis as much as it is a narrative."ÑThe Economist "[A] perceptive and original study."ÑJenny Uglow, The Guardian "The great tide of Dickensiana, to celebrate the bicentenary of the author's birth in February 2012, has already begun to appear in the shops. While much of the attention will be focused on Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life, my own favorite is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist."ÑD.J. Taylor, The Independent "Douglas-Fairhurst's acute and incisive analysis of the contemporary reception of Dickens's journalism and then his first serialized fiction reveals how Dickens's keen observations and storytelling talent allowed him to rise above his station, as he forged his experiences into fictionÉA perceptive and speculative biography."ÑLonnie Weatherby, Library Journal "Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens ponders the question of how this phenomenal man happened. He identifies a series of self-defining moments in the processÉ Douglas-Fairhurst has all of Dickens, it seems, at his fingertips and his ear is cocked for every significant echoÉ What is extraordinarily fresh in Becoming Dickens is Douglas-Fairhurst's ability to support [his] arguments by sensitive explication de texteÉ Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reads Dickens the author with brilliantly acuity. If [this book is a] harbinger of what is to come in the bicentennial year, 2012 will be a memorial fully worthy of the great Boz."ÑJohn Sutherland, Literary Review "Where the progress of a famous person's narrative can take on a retrospective air of inevitability, Becoming Dickens restores the sheer unlikeliness of Dickens's achievement, showing how easily it all might not have happenedÉ [Douglas-Fairhurst] shows how his subject's vividly imagined characters have the ring of truth because their creator knows that he could well have been among their number. Dickens's work, we're shown, can be read as a series of what-if scenarios, explorations in fiction of paths not taken in life. We didn't need a new reason to revisit those deathless novels, but now we have one."ÑIan McGillis, The Montreal Gazette "Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist is quite possibly the best piece of Dickens criticism since John Carey's The Violent EffigyÑa series of minute investigations into the way Dickens projected elements of his early life into the fiction that followed it, full of arresting historical detail and sharp-eyed deductions."ÑD.J. Taylor, New Statesman "'Why did Dickens spend his entire life writing stories?' [Virginia] Woolf wondered. 'What was his conception?'É Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens is the freshest and most insightful book I have read on this great theme since my first schoolboy reading of [Humphry] House]'s The Dickens World]É It is hard to imagine a better book on Dickens than Douglas-Fairhurst's appearing in the coming months. I shall treasure itÉ Harvard University Press has produced, for Douglas-Fairhurst, a fine volume in the best tradition of American bookmaking: nice paper, elegant dust wrapper and binding, a volume to keep on your shelf forever."ÑA.N. Wilson, New Statesman "[A] revealing and groundbreaking study, which succeeds by focusing, narrowly, on the early years in Dickens's career as a writer in the 1830s."ÑMichiko Kakutani, The New York Times "[A] lively and detailed bookÉ Douglas-Fairhurst serves as a sharp-eyed, sharp-witted, yet sympathetic tour guide to the young Dickens's strange world and equally strange sensibility."ÑDavid Gates, The New York Times Book Review "This book captures the chameleon Dickens as a product of his era before he became its creator."ÑPublishers Weekly "Superbly attuned to his subject, Douglas-Fairhurst's approach is a risky one, but it pays off. By boring deeply into this crucial time in Dickens's life, his early and mid-20s, he identifies the point where experience could really become a crucible of artistic creation. And he shows also how easily Dickens could have gone in a different direction, as he explored journalism, lawyering and even acting as avocationsÉ Douglas-Fairhurst's fascinating exploration of what-ifs makes us appreciate what Dickens gave us as a writer all the more."ÑMartin Rubin, The San Francisco Chronicle "Instead of trying to cast the whole life in crisp relief, [Douglas-Fairhurst] takes a pieceÑfrom the beginning to PickwickÑand turns it slowly in the light. His idea is that if we draw on all we've come to know about Dickens, we might capture the density of self-in-society, especially this blooming self in this bristling society. So we often move a day or an hour at a time in Becoming Dickens, watching the twitchy uncertain discovery of a vocation and then the thrill when this writer realizes he's a genius. Douglas-Fairhurst has a clever idea that also happens to work: As the young Dickens moves through London, the biography collects fictional episodes that correspond to the life-stage. So when Dickens is thrown to the blacking factory, Becoming Dickens gathers the tales of lost and abandoned children that will unspool through the career. When he's an apprentice in a law office (and a career as a writer is still notional), we meet the tribe of clerks who stumble through the novels' pages. It could have felt like clunky machinery, but the approach deftly shows how much of the future writer lives within the present journalist and the would-be actor. Douglas-Fairhurst lingers over phrases that echo back from the end of the career to the beginnings. He sees life and work as one work; and by slowing everything down, he comes closer than anyone before to cracking the mystery of the erupting young Dickens: the mix of frantic self-making and joyous cordiality."ÑMichael Levenson, Slate "Brilliantly original, stylishly written, thoughtful, measured and altogether exhilaratingÉ It is Douglas-Fairhurst's triumph that he helps us understand how the textures of 19th-century life generally, and Dickens's life in particular, were reformulated into works of art that continue to resonate two centuries later. Becoming Dickens is itself a work of art. Incidents that have been written about hundreds of times before are made freshÉ Throughout, we are given just the right amount of historical background, so that we understand the context Dickens was operating in without being overwhelmed by unnecessary detail. But, ultimately, it is the keen psychological insights that make Douglas-Fairhurst's book so rewarding."ÑJudith Flanders, The Spectator "Throughout, the book is alive to [the] ways in which Dickens recycled his own experience and obsessionsÉ In very Dickensian fashion, the book continually shimmies between subjectsÉ From clerks and clothes we move to the idea of costume and performance, seamlessly conjuring up Dickens's passion for amateur theatricals and his early experiments with farce. And no sidestep is misplaced. The influence of the theatre proves essential for understanding the young writer, with the book charting the death of Dickens the playwright as much as the birth of Dickens the novelistÉ [Douglas-Fairhurst's] quirky approach brings color to scenes that too often exist only in black-and-white. For a vivid introduction to a writer and an age, I can think of few better places to begin."ÑMatthew Richardson, The Spectator "[A] subtle and searching bookÉ Dickens is immortal and inexhaustible, and there will be more books in the lead-up to the 200th anniversary of his birth next year. If any of them outshine [this one] we shall be luckier than mere mortals deserve."ÑJohn Carey, The Sunday Times "A brilliant job. Becoming Dickens wittily illuminates the early career (clerk, reporter, magazine hack) of a writer whoÑlike Sherlock HolmesÑcould pluck a man's life-history from the tilt of his umbrella."ÑMiranda Seymour, The Sunday Times "Becoming Dickens gives a remarkable insight into the conditions that allowed Dickens to emerge as the foremost Victorian novelistÉ Becoming Dickens gives a particularly rich analysis of the author's earliest writings, including the parliamentary reports from his days as a reporter."ÑGrace Moore, The Sydney Morning Herald "[A] spirited account of Dickens's early yearsÉ Dickens's restless energy makes him an untidy and sometimes paradoxical subject, but it is what gave his writing its lasting power. The strength of Douglas-Fairhurst's book Becoming Dickens lies in its exploration of these contradictions as they are embedded in early Victorian culture. He is especially sharp on t, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London England: 2011, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London: 1979. Hardcover with dustjacket. Good condition. Dustjacket is worn and faded. Frank Hamilton Cushing's stay at Zuni pueblo from 1879 to 1884 made him the first profession anthropologist actually to live with his subjects. Learning the language and winning acceptance as a member not only o0f the tribe but of the tribal council and the Bow Priesthood, he was the original participant observer and the only man in history to hold the double title of "1st War Chief of Zuni, U.S. Ass't Ethnologist." A pioneer in southwestern ethology, he combined the disciplines of science with a remarkable imaginative capacity for identifying with Indian modes of though and perception - and corresponding gifts of expression. Includes an Index. "This book is profusely illustrated with historic photographs and detailed line drawings. Zuni . . . should appeal to all levels of readers, professional and nonprofessional. Highly recommended." - Choice ISBN: 0803221002., University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London: 1979<
