- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
-
Foreword Outside the Frame -
Introduction An American Outsider -
I A Single Man and Los Angeles Culture in the 1960s -
1 A Single Man and the American Maurice -
2 Labor of Love -
3 Working through Grief in the Drafts of A Single Man -
4 Writing the Unspeakable in A Single Man and Mrs. Dalloway -
5 A Whole without Transcendence -
6 Ford Does Isherwood -
7 A Real Diamond -
II The Religious Writer -
8 Isherwood and the Psycho-geography of Home -
9 Isherwood and Huxley -
10 Down Where on a Visit? -
11 A Phone Call by the River -
12 “Give Me Devotion … Even Against My Will” -
13 Spiritual Searching in Isherwood’s Artistic Production -
III A Writer at Odds with Himself in Cold War America -
14 Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward -
15 Huxley and Isherwood: The California Years -
16 The Celebrity Effect -
17 A Writer at Work -
18 Pulp Isherwood -
19 Not Satisfied with the Ending - Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Index
Down Where on a Visit?
Down Where on a Visit?
Isherwood’s Mythology of Self
- Chapter:
- (p.139) 10 Down Where on a Visit?
- Source:
- The American Isherwood
- Author(s):
Rebecca Gordon Stewart
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood manipulates his creation of a “mythology of self” in the 1962 novel Down There on a Visit. In the 1950s, as Isherwood continued to struggle with elements of The World in the Evening, he notes in his “Writing Notebook” that he has a new idea for a story, one that would turn out to be Down There on a Visit. An analysis of Isherwood’s unpublished notes alongside the final novel reveals that many of the themes that formed his original plan of rewriting Dante’s journey through Hell and Purgatory as narrated in The Divine Comedy in fact have remained at the forefront of Down There on a Visit. This chapter considers Down There on a Visit’s connection to both The Divine Comedy and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel Là-bas in terms of style and themes.
Keywords: novel, Christopher Isherwood, mythology of self, Down There on a Visit, Dante, The Divine Comedy, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-bas, Hell, Purgatory
Minnesota Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
-
Foreword Outside the Frame -
Introduction An American Outsider -
I A Single Man and Los Angeles Culture in the 1960s -
1 A Single Man and the American Maurice -
2 Labor of Love -
3 Working through Grief in the Drafts of A Single Man -
4 Writing the Unspeakable in A Single Man and Mrs. Dalloway -
5 A Whole without Transcendence -
6 Ford Does Isherwood -
7 A Real Diamond -
II The Religious Writer -
8 Isherwood and the Psycho-geography of Home -
9 Isherwood and Huxley -
10 Down Where on a Visit? -
11 A Phone Call by the River -
12 “Give Me Devotion … Even Against My Will” -
13 Spiritual Searching in Isherwood’s Artistic Production -
III A Writer at Odds with Himself in Cold War America -
14 Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward -
15 Huxley and Isherwood: The California Years -
16 The Celebrity Effect -
17 A Writer at Work -
18 Pulp Isherwood -
19 Not Satisfied with the Ending - Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Index
