- 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
Isherwood and Huxley
Isherwood and Huxley
The Novel as Mystic Fable
- Chapter:
- (p.121) 9 Isherwood and Huxley
- Source:
- The American Isherwood
- Author(s):
Robert L. Caserio
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
This chapter examines the role played by the novel in Christopher Isherwood’s attitudes toward mysticism as well as his writing’s relation to Aldous Huxley. To this end, it considers the place of religion in Anglo-American modernism, with particular emphasis on G. R. S. Mead’s modernist journal The Quest, one of the transnational conduits whereby Eastern religions, including Vedanta, entered the background that nurtured Isherwood. Isherwood’s statements about his fiction’s relation to religion are not the whole story of the ties that his novels—and the novelistic genre itself—might have to mystical experience. This chapter also looks at Huxley’s hostility to the novel form and Isherwood’s 1980 book My Guru and His Disciple. Finally, it discusses the novelistic form’s relation to contemplation and to timelessness by offering a reading of Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit.
Keywords: novel, Christopher Isherwood, mysticism, Aldous Huxley, religion, modernism, G. R. S. Mead, The Quest, My Guru and His Disciple, Down There on a Visit
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