The found voice : writers' beginnings / Denis Sampson.
| Author/creator |
Sampson, Denis, 1948- |
| Other author/creator | Oxford University Press. |
| Format | Electronic and Book |
| Edition | First edition. |
| Publication Info | Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2016. |
| Description | viii, 173 pages ; 23 cm |
| Supplemental Content | Full text available from Oxford Scholarship Online |
| Supplemental Content | Full text available from Oxford Scholarship Online Literature |
| Subject(s) |
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| Contents | Prologue : the writing voice -- V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street : the 'first true book' -- Alice Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades : the personal voice -- William Trevor's Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel : the lonely voice -- Mavis Gallant's Green Water, Green Sky : 'authentic hallucinations' -- J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands : 'the voice of the doubting self' -- Epilogue : 'writer as writer'. |
| Abstract | "'The Found Voice: Writers' Beginnings' uses the means of literary biography and criticism to do something rarely attempted--to understand how a key creative period establishes the authoritative voice of a unique artist. The essays that explore this hidden process of the writer writing focus on some of the major writers of recent times: V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, William Trevor, and Mavis Gallant. The focus of investigation is a single work by each author, and many of them identify the book in which this turning point was reached. The writers have a somewhat different sense of what the voice is, "a true voice," "the voice in the mind," "the writing voice," etc., yet all of them accept the phrase "finding a voice" as a decisive and necessary process towards a unique style and vision, their raison d'etre as artists. These essays allow each one to define his or her sense of the process of writing, and their style is exploratory. Nevertheless, certain patterns emerge, of migration and cultural displacement, of linguistic self-consciousness, of memory and a reimagining of the first home, of absorbing and rejecting mentors and models. Crucially, the essays rely not just on what led up to the moment of creation but on a sense of the career that emerged from it. Most of the writers have written retrospectively in memoirs, interviews or essays about the pivotal work and its foundational significance. They are the best witnesses to the process, although their silence or their commentary is understood in terms of the many strands of the narrative that each essay presents" -- Provided by publisher. |
| General note | "Beginning to write in the mid-twentieth century, in parts of the English-speaking world that had formerly been colonies in the British Empire, and conscious of the major English figures of modernism and of the post-war literary landscape, each writer nevertheless set out to discover the appropriate form and style for his or her own work ... All these writers insist on their freedom to be guided by intuition in their exploration of their own material and in their discovery of their own voice"--Page 147. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-167) and index. |
| Access restriction | Available only to authorized users. |
| Technical details | Mode of access: World Wide Web |
| Genre/form | Electronic books. |
| LCCN | 2015951895 |
| ISBN | 9780198752998 (hbk.) |
| ISBN | 0198752997 (hbk.) |
Available Items
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions | |
| Electronic Resources | View Online Content | ✔ Available |