Here & Elsewhere: The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Burke - Softcover

Burke, Kenneth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1574232010 ISBN 13: 9781574232011

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press, 2005

Synopsis

The stories of Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) were unlike any other fiction of the 1920s. Not for him the stripped-down language of Hemingway or the topical satire of Fitzgerald; instead he constructed rhetorically gorgeous essay-stories that anticipated (by 40 years) the narrative techniques of Calvino, Gass, and Nicholson Baker. Here & Elsewhere gathers, for the first time, all of Burke's fiction: 23 short stories and Towards a Better Life (1932), which Denis Donoghue calls "one of my favorite novels, full of sentences so luminous that I could be easily persuaded that style is everything."

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Before he turned to criticism and become the American Coleridge, Kenneth Burke was a writer of fiction. His avant-garde short stories were unlike any others of the 1920s; indeed, stories even remotely like them would not come along for decades. Not for Burke the stripped-down language of Hemingway or the topical social satire of Fitzgerald; instead he was intent on constructing rhetorically gorgeous "peopled essays" that anticipated, by nearly half a century, the work of Calvino, Gass, and Nicholson Baker.

More precisely, Burke appropriated for modernism the forgotten formal modes -- and the bawdy comic verve -- of Tristam Shandy and Candide. His characters are thinkers, not doers; they lament, rejoice, beseech, admonish, aphorize, and inveigh in the manner of a Greenwich Village Samuel Johnson. Between the arias, as it were, they reveal something of themselves, their motives, and their moral predicaments. "Burke's sentences are so eventful," says Denis Donoghue, "that the uneventfulness of the 'whole' is a delusion. [His stories] are like the human body when it seems to be doing nothing . . . but all the time the internal life is throbbing and buzzing, al the organs at 'full throtle.'"

Here & Elsewhere collects, for the first time in one volume, all of Burke's fiction, most of it out of print since the 1960s. The centerpiece is Towards a Better Life (1923), a series of grave, malicious epistles by John Neal, a worldly ascetic and philosophical dandy, addressed to his former friend Anthony, a rival for the affections of the alluring young Florence. Here too are twenty short stories, from the previous uncollected "Parabolic Tale" (1917) to Burke's late masterpiece "The Anesthetic Revelation of Herone Liddell" (1957), as well as three prose exercises -- mad riffs on old age, old "isms," and old institutions.

Here & Elsewhere shows, in the words of TLS, "what a man can do [in] the music of ideas. Burke's stories take their stand on the last ditch: imagination, intensity, style."

About the Author:

Denis Donoghue has taught English, Irish, and American Literature at University College, Dublin, Cambridge University and King's College, Cambridge, and New York University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1574232010
• ISBN 13: 9781574232011
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416