Description
Book SynopsisNew perspectives on Christopher Isherwood as a searching and transnational writer
“Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places,” muses the narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet (1945), which he wrote in his adopted home of Los Angeles after years of dislocation and desperation. In Isherwood in Transit, James J.Berg and Chris Freeman bring together diverse Isherwood scholars to understand the challenges this writer faced as a consequence of his travel.
Based on a conference at the Huntington Library, where Isherwood’s recently opened papers are held, Isherwood in Transit considers the writer not as an English, continental, or American writer but as a transnational one, whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections and engagements arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s.
Approaching Isherwood’s rootlessness and restlessness from various perspectives, these essays show that long after he made a new home in California and became an American citizen, Christopher Isherwood remained unsettled, although his wanderings became spiritual and personal rather than geographic.
Contributors: Barrie Jean Borich, DePaul U; Jamie Carr, Niagara U; Robert L. Caserio, Penn State U, University Park; Lisa Colletta, American U of Rome; Lois Cucullu, U of Minnesota; Jaime Harker, U of Mississippi; Carola M. Kaplan, California State U, Pomona; Calvin W. Keogh, Central European U, Budapest; Victor Marsh; Wendy Moffat, Dickinson College; Xenobe Purvis; Bidhan Roy, California State U, Los Angeles; Katharine Stevenson, U of Texas at Austin; Edmund White.
Trade Review"The seventeen essays resulted from a conference after the opening of Isherwood’s vast archive at The Huntington, and approach Isherwood in light of his peripatetic days and his continuing spiritual, Vedantic explorations of the spirit. Be sure to read Christopher Bram’s excellent foreword."—Lavender Magazine
"The book does not try to dissimulate Isherwood’s hesitations and occasional mistakes, related to issues of class (for instance in his perhaps somewhat exploitative relationships with working class, that is unemployed and hungry hustlers in his Berlin years) or race (for instance in his contacts with Mishima). This is a very courageous and mature approach, and I think a very healthy stance in the current context of revenge culture."—Leonardo Reviews
"Anyone with an interest in Isherwood or in Japanese culture and sexual patterns will find this book a worthwhile acquisition."—Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
Table of ContentsContents
Foreword: A Fan’s Notes
Christopher Bram
Introduction: Christopher’s Kind
Chris Freeman and James J. Berg
1. Christopher Isherwood and the California Dream
Sara S. Hodson
2. “Rejecting the Real World Outright”: The Shared Fantasy of Mortmere
Katherine Stevenson
3. “A Faith of Personal Sincerity”: Christopher Isherwood’s Debt to the Individualism of E. M. Forster
Xenobe Purvis
4. The Archival “I”: Forster, Isherwood, and the Future of Queer Biography
Wendy Moffat
5. A Queer Progress: Christopher Isherwood, Sexual Exceptionalism, and Thirties’ Berlin
Lois Cucullu
6. Fellow Travelers
James J. Berg and Chris Freeman
7. Isherwood as Travel Writer
Lisa Colletta
8.The World in the Evening: Character in Transit
Robert L. Caserio
9. Isherwood’s “Jolly Corner” in Down There on a Visit: The Christopher Who Was Encounters the Christopher Who Might Have Been
Carola M. Kaplan
10. Grumbling in Eldorado: A Single Man in the American Utopia
Calvin W. Keogh
11. Pacific Rimming: Queer Expatriatism, Transpacific Los Angeles, and Christopher Isherwood’s Queer Sixties
Jaime Harker
12. Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading A Single Man
Edmund White
13. We Can See the Hilld from Our Bed: Christopher and His Nonfictions
Barrie Jean Borich
14. In Search of a Spiritual Home: Christopher Isherwood, the Perennial Philosophy, and Vedanta
Bidhan Chandra Roy
15. “Enlarging Their Clearing in the Jungle”: The Political Significance of Christopher Isherwood’s My Guru and His Disciple
Victor Marsh
16. “The Aim of Art is to Transcend Art”: Writing Spirituality in My Guru and His Disciple
Jamie Carr
17. A Conversation with Christopher Isherwood, 1979
Dennis Bartel
Acknowledgments
Index
