Hugh Kenner

In Historical Fictions Hugh Kenner applies his extraordinarily nimble mind and unrivaled style to the alchemy of speech turning into language, language becoming art, and art finally settling down as culture. A variety of literary topics are addressed in forty-three lively, often humorous, and wonderfully informative essays.With his trenchant, famously entertaining touch, Kenner explores the role of counting in literature (Joyce and St. Augustine shared a preference for the number eleven); the extravagant efforts through the ages to preserve the Iliad and the Odyssey (focusing on Ezra Pound's contributions); and Tom Wolfe's prose through the purple decades (Kenner calls him "the nonchalant master of the neon-piped sentence"). Other writers who fall under Kenner's appraising gaze include Flann O'Brien, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Dante, Leslie Fiedler, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Nabokov.

A critical discussion of Pound's poetry.

With his customary wit and erudition, one of America's most celebrated and distinguished critics examines the response of literary Modernism to environmental changes caused by technology. Focusing on Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Beckett, Hugh Kenner explores how inventions as various as the linotype, the typewriter, and the computer altered the way these writers viewed and depicted the world. 'splendid exploration of the relation between the mechanization of society and the literary imagination ... Immensely readable.' Washington Times Magazine

One of the most important books ever written on Uylsses, Dublin's Joyce established Hugh Kenner as a significant modernist critic. This pathbreaking analysis presents Uylsses as a "bit of anti-matter that Joyce sent out to eat the world." The author assumes that Joyce wasn't a man with a box of mysteries, but a writer with a subject: his native European metropolis of Dublin. Dublin's Joyce provides the reader with a perspective of Joyce as a superemely important literary figure without considering him to be the revealer of a secret doctrine.

With characteristic flair, Kenner explores the ways Joyce teaches us to read his novel as Joyce taught himself to write it: moving from the simple to the complex, from the familiar to the strange and new, from the norms of the nineteenth-century novel to the open forms of modernism.

This pioneering study did much to rehabilitate Ezra Pound's reputation after a long period of critical hostility and neglect. Published in 1951, it was the first comprehensive examination of the Cantos and other major works that would strongly influence the course of contemporary poetry.

"Hugh Kenner's "The Pound Era" could as well be known as the Kenner era, for there is no critic who has more firmly established his claim to valuable literary property than has Kenner to the first three decades of the 20th century in England. Author of pervious studies of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pound (to name a few), Kenner bestrides modern literature if not like a colossus then at least a presence of formidable proportions. A new book by him is certainly an event....A demanding, enticing book that glitters at the same time it antagonizes....""The Pound Era" presents us with an idiosyncratic but sharply etched skeletal view of our immediate literary heritage."--"The New York Times" "It is notoriously difficult to recognize degrees of pre-eminence among one's near-contemporaries. We talk now of the age of Donne, a label that would have seemed bizarre to Ben Johnson. Will "The Pound Era" seem an appropriate designation, 50 or 100 years hence, for the epoch we think of as 'modern'? Mr. Kenner's brilliantly written book establishes an excellent case for supposing the answer to be 'Yes.'"--"The Economist" "Mr. Kenner's study...is not so much a book as a library, or better, a new kind of book in which biography, history, and the analysis of literature are so harmoniously articulated that every page has a narrative sense...."The Pound Era" is a book to be read and reread and studied. For the student of modern letters it is a treasure, for the general reader it is one of the most interesting books he will ever pick up in a lifetime of reading."--"National Review"