![]() ![]() This coincidence whetted my appetite for the discovery of a yet very much uncharted territory-that of Powys’s literary essays and it has enabled me to compare a well-known and widely acclaimed scholar’s approach, that of Bakhtin, to Powys’s more idiosyncratic one, that of a poet. Surprisingly enough, the only other critical books on a single author written by the two men were both on Dostoievsky. At the same time, he was wide off the mark, unaware as he was - and quite logically so 1 - that in the depths of Russia another man, Mikhaïl Bakhtin, had just spent several years writing a doctoral dissertation on that very same Renaissance French writer. He probably said so because he had been asked to write a critical book on Rabelais in 1942 and had been working hard on it. ![]() well, MUCH that has been written on him’ (quoted in Peltier 1). 1 Powys’s Rabelais was published in 1948 Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World was to be rediscovered in (.)ġ In a letter to a friend written in 1944, John Cowper Powys stated: ‘I have got (and I believe nobody else has got as much dope and data at this moment on Rabelais as I’ve got around me) all that has been discovered about him and all that has been translated from him and most that . . . ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |