The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry: Souls and Shamans is an interdisciplinary investigation of the multifaceted, intuitive insight of international modernist writer Malcolm Lowry through an analysis of a selection of works and correspondence. Nigel H. Foxcroft analyzes his psychogeographic perception of the interconnectedness of East-West cultures and civilizations in terms of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican customs; the Mexican Day of the Dead festival; the Atlantis myth; surrealism; and Russian literary, filmic, and political influences. He traces his intellectual efforts in pursuing philosophical and cosmic knowledge to bridge the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities. This monograph identifies Lowry’s attempts to reintegrate modernism with primitivism in his quest for an elixir of life for the survival of humanity on the brink of global catastrophe, as indicated in In Ballast to the White Sea and Under the Volcano. It also examines his sustained endeavors to attain psychoanalytical atonement with himself and his environment in Ultramarine, Swinging the Maelstrom, “The Forest Path to the Spring,” and October Ferry to Gabriola. It also discusses the odyssey on which Lowry and his literary protagonists embark to connect with the past and to gain a deeper insight into human nature in Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, La Mordida, and “Through the Panama.” Scholars of cultural studies, history, humanities, Latin American studies, literature, and Russian studies will find this book particularly useful.

Ten years in the making, Under the Volcano is the best-known work of writer Malcolm Lowry. Published first in 1947, it is a brilliant, moving, and complex novel, perhaps the last fictional masterpiece to emerge from the modernist movement. As the years went by, Lowry's obsessive rewriting took him further and further into his book, which changed relatively little in the outer semblance of action and main characters but became utterly transformed in texture from the thin and mediocre version of 1940 to the rich tapestry of 1947. The numerous manuscripts allow a look at the processes by which Lowry created not only his masterwork but also his own reputation as a modernist genius. This study offers an extended examination of individual drafts as the novel slowly developed and, in a final chapter, an appraisal of the implications of Lowry's revisions for the book as published, an appraisal that suggests bases for new readings of Under the Volcano.

This collection focuses on Lowry’s spatial dynamics, from the psychogeography of the Letterist and the Situationist International, through musical forms (especially jazz), cinema, photography, and spatial poetic writing, to the spaces of exception, bio-politics, and the creaturely. It presents previously unpublished essays by both established and new international Lowry scholars, as well as innovative ways of conceiving of his aesthetic practice. In each of the book’s three sections, critics engage in the notion of Lowry as a multi-media artist who influenced and was deeply influenced by a broad range of modernist and early postmodernist aesthetic practices. Acutely aware of and engaged in the world of film, sensitive to the role of the graphical surface in advertising and propaganda, and deeply immersed in a vast range of literary traditions and the avant-garde, Lowry worked within an intertextual space that is also a mediascape, one which tends to transgress, or at least exceed, neatly controlled borders or aesthetic boundaries. These new approaches to Lowry’s life and work, which make use of new and recent theoretical perspectives, will encourage fresh debate around Lowry’s writing. Publié en anglais.

Malcolm Lowry was the troubled author of Under the Volcano (1947), a brilliant novel about the last day of an alcoholic former British consul on the Mexican Day of the Dead, the manuscript of which Lowry rescued from the flames when his fisherman's shack burned down in 1944. Lowry's other books were not always so lucky: his first novel, Ultramarine (1930), was stolen after four years' composition and resurrected from a carbon copy; another manuscript, In Ballast to the White Sea, was destroyed in the 1944 fire. An early draft of In Ballast was discovered this century and published in 2014. Lowry's life, like his work, was often lost to chaos; Gordon Bowker's 1994 biography is a masterful account of a life spent adrift.

Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

Looks at the nineteenth-century convergence of a new kind of excessive, habitual drinking, and a new way of thinking about the self, which we came to label ‘existential’.