scholarly journals The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Malcolm Lowry

‘Time is Over’: Postmodern Times

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-219
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
International Travel ◽  
Graham Swift ◽  
Malcolm Lowry ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Martin Amis ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Ian Mcewan ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War and the nuclear threat made it as difficult, after 1945, to look forward affirmatively as to look back. Enlightenment ideas of a ‘project of modernity’ gave way to postmodern scepticism and stasis, reflected by Samuel Beckett and the nouveau roman, and in other ways in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann and the repetitive chronologies of Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell and others. After the 1960s, authors such as Muriel Spark confronted the Holocaust and recent history more directly, as in later decades did Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and others. In this fiction, and generally later in the century, concerns with the clock’s constraints were diminished by long familiarity and by several new factors. These included technologies of film, video, globalised media and the internet, along with increased international travel and encounters with less industrialised cultures. Science fiction, too, and imagination of time-travel, was both symptomatic yet partly redemptive of horological stress. There remained, however, numerous (often historical) novels by authors such as Gabriel García Marquéz, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray and Thomas Pynchon – re-examining, in Mason & Dixon, C18th practices of global measurement – still concerned with the stresses clockwork chronology imposed on modern history.

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947): singular experiences

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-135
Author(s):  
Steven Earnshaw
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
World War ◽  
Malcolm Lowry ◽  
Day Of The Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Under The Volcano

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano places the committed drinker, in the form of ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin, in the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ festival, so that the main character encounters ‘hell’ in physical and spiritual dimensions. The novel is technically innovative in its aim to register the subjective experience of the Existential drinker: Geoffrey Firmin’s world is constructed through a highly-individualised, expressionistic symbolism, a mid-century representation of the modern, alienated self, abandoned and suffering despair in a Godless world – the latter made evident by the novel’s attention to the rise of totalitarianism, which forms the backdrop to the events here on a day close to the onset of World War II. There is discussion of the novel’s difficulty and form, and a comparison of some aspects of the novel with Kafka’s The Trial, and how these relate to representation of the Existential drinker.

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