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The Metamorphoses of David Garnett

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

W. R. Irwin
W. R. Irwin*
Affiliation:
State University oe Iowa, Iowa City
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Extract

David Garnett achieved a triumphal entry into the citadel of fiction with two short fantasies, Lady into Fox (1922) and A Man in the Zoo (1924). The former was awarded the James Tait Black Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. The latter was welcomed by eagerly waiting reviewers, who expressed their delight that he could follow a tour de force, the most dangerous of beginnings, with a work showing intellectual solidity and range as well as virtuosity. Both books have kept their places of esteem in modern fiction.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1958 , pp. 386 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

Note 1 in page 386 Forces in Modern British Literature, 1885-1946 (New York, 1949), p. 112.

Note 2 in page 386 Several reviewers of Lady into Fox compared Garnett's skill in evoking the image and spirit of wild nature with W. H. Hudson's. They perhaps knew of the long-time friendship of Hudson and David Garnett's father, Edward, who edited A Hudson Anthology (London, 1924) and Letters from W. H. Hudson to Edward Garnett, 1901-1922 (London and Toronto, 1925). David Garnett is several times affectionately mentioned in the letters.

Note 3 in page 386 The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1939), p. 137.

Note 4 in page 386 Mythical Thought in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, ii, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), 46-47. See also Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New York, 1953), pp. 102-111.

Note 5 in page 387 Ovid, Metamorphoses, p, 665-675.

Note 6 in page 387 Metamorphosis or transformation in witchcraft usually means the temporary and voluntary assumption of an animal form by the witch, for some nefarious purpose. Sometimes change is imposed on an unwilling victim, and the situation then resembles that characteristic of enchantment. (See George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, Cambridge, Mass., 1929, pp. 174-184.)

Note 7 in page 388 David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest (London, 1955), pp. 244-246. This book is the second volume of Garnett's autobiography, which is appearing under the general title The Golden Echo.

Note 8 in page 389 The Nation, 23 May 1923, p. 603.

Note 9 in page 389 New Statesman and Nation, 24 March 1934, p. 452. This remark occurs in a review of The Tales of D. H. Lawrence. Garnett wrote for the New Statesman and Nation the weekly page entitled “Books in General” from 18 March 1933 to 7 Oct. 1939, with only infrequent interruptions. In his contributions he does not hesitate to comment with the freedom of a personal essayist.

Note 10 in page 390 New York: Knopf, 1924.

Note 11 in page 390 The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), pp. 58-59.

Note 12 in page 391 See the New Statesman and Nation, 25 Nov. 1933, p. 664; 11 Aug. 1934, p. 183; 10 July 1937, p. 74; and The Golden Echo, I, passim.

Note 13 in page 392 New York Times, 15 Jan. 1924.