Scott Jr., Nathan A

Philadelphia. 1976. Fortress Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0800604830. 164 pages. hardcover. keywords: Poetry Literary Criticism America Literature . FROM THE PUBLISHER - Many writers who created what is now regarded as the classic canon of modern literature - Rilke, Kafka, Gide, Virginia Woolf, Sartre, Beckett - appear strongly disinclined to endorse the idea of man-in-society, and their tendency is to posit a radical solitariness as the universal human condition. Indeed, one of the leading characteristics of ‘modernism' in twentieth century poetry and fiction might be said to be the reluctance expressed by so much of this literature to acknowledge the social world as the repository of man's most essential truth: ‘real life' is thought to be elsewhere, in the inwardness of individualist subjectivity. Again and again, the literary imagination of our time has located the scene and site of the human drama outside the realm of what Martin Buber called ‘the interhuman.' But there are certain great exceptions to this general pattern, and, of these. Nathan Scott in his latest book holds up three of the most notable examples - in the work of T.S. Eliot, Andre Malraux, and W. H. Auden. In each of these focal figures he locates an exemplary instance in recent literature of the human world being conceived to be a world of coexistence, and he exhibits then as poets - Malraux, too, since his fiction is viewed as essentially a poetic enterprise - whose special distinction it is to prompt reflection on the nature of civic virtue. inventory #27925 ISBN: 0800604830.