Examines the concept of play in Western thought, with special emphasis on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and envisions literary discourse as contributing to an alternative mentality based on peace rather than power.

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is now recognized as one of the major novels of the 20th Century, whose breadth and experimental prose have influenced a wide range of contemporary writers. This study, originally published in 1984, considers the significance of the autobiographical elements in Lowry’s writing, in the context of his developing concern with fictionality and the romantic sensibility. It gives special attention to his exotic many-sided masterpiece and discusses the ways in which the narrative’s reflexive games-playing elements affect the representation of character, history, myth and magic. It surveys Lowry’s late experimental novels and stories and considers how their metafictional aspects anticipate some key interests of contemporary writing.

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, ranked number 11 on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century. As a novel of the mid-twentieth century, Under the Volcano is an almost autobiographical tale of self-destruction inspired by Lowry’s real experiences. Moreover, the text is considered one of literature's most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Lowry’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work - Character Summaries - Plot Guides - Section and Chapter Overviews - Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

Swinging the Maelstrom is the story of a musician enduring existence in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in New York. Written during his happiest and most fruitful years, this novella reveals the deep healing influence that the idyllic retreat at Dollarton had on Lowry. This long-overdue scholarly edition will allow scholars to engage in a genetic study of the text and reconstruct, step by step, the creative process that developed from a rather pessimistic and misanthropic vision of the world as a madhouse (The Last Address, 1936), via the apocalyptic metaphors of a world on the brink of Armageddon (The Last Address, 1939), to a world that, in spite of all its troubles, leaves room for self-irony and humanistic concern (Swinging the Maelstrom,1942–1944).

The first comprehensive study on the pattern of guilt and wandering in literature, this book examines the relationship between the two complex concepts as they appear in twentieth-century novels, positing its methodological premises on archetypal criticism and both close and distant reading, but also drawing on psychology, anthropology, mythology, and religion. This research deciphers a common paradigm and literary representation whose archetype within Western literature is found in the biblical figure of Cain, while presenting a critical framework valid for boundary-crossing comparative approaches. From Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, to Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome and Ōoka Shōhei’s Fires on the Plain, this book is not merely a thematic study, but an analysis of the literary phenomena that appear in those novels where the sense of guilt is controversially subjective, or so collective as to be perceived as universal, as is often the case with war and postwar literature. Di Gennaro goes beyond the analysis of explicit rewritings of the story of Cain, in order to uncover the monomyth through its rhetorical structures and mythical methods. The wasteland with no religion; the lost, abandoned garden; the classical and religiously-corrupted city; and the tropical, cannibalistic island at war are the respective settings of these narratives, where the issue is neither homelessness nor journeying, but, rather, the desperate and futile movement toward self-consciousness, or self-destruction. After the Second World War, much was silenced rather than left unsaid. This study retraces those silent cries over history through the powerful literary marks of myths.

Swinging the Maelstrom is a collection of new critical essays on the work and life of Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957). An international group of literary critics and artists examines a wide range of Lowry's work from the diverse perspectives of biography, correspondence, translation, manuscript editing, poetry, and inter-artistic comparison, including a number of investigations of his masterpiece, Under the Volcano, and his post-Volcano fiction.