Kirjahaku

This volume discusses the relationships between the philosophy of Mysticism, which traces its lineage back into prehistory, with that of the world of more traditional philosophy and literature. The author argues for the centrality of mysticism's role in the philosophical and artistic development of western culture. The connections between these worlds are underscored as the author examines the works of Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Iris Murdoch, Yeats, Æ (George Russell), T.S. Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, Huxley, Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Tony Kushner, among others.

This comprehensive and accessible reference work serves Isherwood scholars who need quick access to people, places, novels, stories, essays and plays, introduces Isherwood to those who know little of him, expands the knowledge of the literate general reader, and refreshes teachers of literature with Isherwood details. Entries on Isherwood's most influential friends, including W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley and Stephen Spender, are significant. Included are all of the monumental "roles" Isherwood exemplified during his life--writer, rebel, gay-activist hero, and proud exponent of the Eastern philosophy known as Vedanta.

In a comprehensive critical study of the literary artist, mystic and gay-activist icon Christopher Isherwood, David Garrett Izzo draws on previously unavailable material to offer a fresh appraisal of the writer's literary milieu and his influence on 20th-century literature and culture. The first thorough examination of Isherwood's work and life in 20 years, Izzo's analysis brings into play the Mortmere stories, by Isherwood and Edward Upward (dating from the 1920s but published only in 1994), and the ""Diaries, 1939-1960"" published in 1996, to position Isherwood within a circle of British writers that included - besides Upward - W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. Describing Isherwood as a ""catalyzing influence"" on the Auden generation, Izzo explores the dissemination of Isherwood's ideas through his own work and the writings of his contemporaries. Tracing Isherwood's personal and literary evolution, Izzo details the writer's rebellion against England's class-conscious traditions, his immigration to the United States in 1939 and his study of Vedantic philosophy. Izzo chronicles Isherwood's rejection of the traditional hero and his search for a more sensitive, less vainglorious alternative whom Isherwood dubbed the Truly Strong Man. Izzo suggests that all of Isherwood's writings - British and American - reflect his quest to represent artistically the Truly Strong Man, a quest Isherwood fulfilled afer meeting his Vedantic guru Swami Prabhavananda. Proposing that the writer's American art serves as a metaphor for his spiritual philosophy, Izzo reads Isherwood's American novels in light of his Vedantism and places his autobiographical work from the final years of his life in the context of his adopted religious beliefs.