By Paul Douglass

Beforehand, Bergson's extensively stated effect on American literature hasn't ever been comprehensively mapped. writer Paul Douglass explains and evaluates Bergson's that means for American writers, starting with Eliot and relocating via Ransom, Penn Warren, and Tate to Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, and others. will probably be a customary element of reference.

Bergson used to be the continental thinker of the early 1900s, a celeb, as Sartre could later be. Profoundly influential all through Europe, and greatly mentioned in England and the US within the teenagers, Twenties, and Thirties, Bergson is now infrequently learn. His present "obsolescence," Douglass argues, illuminates the Western shift from sleek to put up- Modern.

Ambitious in scope, this e-book continues to be admirably with regards to Bergson himself: what he stated, the place that matches within the ancient context of philosophy, why his principles moved around the Atlantic, and the way he affected American writers. on the book's center are readings of Eliot's feedback and poetry, analyses of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and reviews of Ransom's, Tate's and Penn Warren's criticism.

This impressively researched and fantastically written examine will stay of lasting worth to scholars of yank literature.