Although the title of this volume is Aldous Huxley between East and West, the order of the articles found within goes from West to East, which naturally imitates Huxley's own progress, especially since he went to the trouble of stepping out as far West as possible before starting for the East. Indeed one could argue that he was already on his way there before he left for California, a continuous journey, perhaps, since from the Californian shores of the Pacific the East is the further West. After the Introduction which places Huxley between East and West, the book starts with a consideration of Huxley's family connections, then goes onto his earliest fictions, his interest in science and the issue of modernity, and his experiments with drama and their inherent philosophical concerns. The poetry with which he began his writing career is then viewed as a link between his earlier Western self and his later Oriental interests, suggesting that the latter was always inherent in the former. A number of considerations of the Utopian themes in Huxley's middle and later fiction leads the volume to a climax with four articles surveying the foibles and the wisdom of Huxley's encounter with Eastern religious thought and philosophy, his misunderstandings, as well as ours, of what actually he had learned and wished to pass on to the Western world.

Aldous Huxley began as a poet. He perfected the voice of the modern satirical poet of ideas, who used art against itself to produce a parodic poetry of breakdowns, collapses, stalemates, and dead ends best suited to the apparent pointlessness of the post-war era. His cleverest, most irreverent poems are contrapuntal: they, in effect, silence venerable poets and cancel traditional formats. Huxley's poetic personas either fail to preserve conventional forms or purposely sabotage them. By 1920, Huxley became the parodic equivalent of the formative intelligences (i.e., Dante, Goethe, and Lucretius) who once synthesized their respective eras positively. In this book, author Jerome Meckier explicates most of Huxley's poems, including Leda, his masterpiece, an ironical modern myth. Meckier traces Huxley's development in terms of the poets he inserted in five of his eleven novels, along with their poems. These poets mostly fail as poets, their different stances falling apart one after another. But Huxley began to detect a spiritual significance underlying the creative urge. This allowed him to rehabilitate many of the Romantic and Victorian poets he formerly ridiculed as frauds and liars. Eventually, he celebrated mystical contemplation as silent poetry, positing a utopia in which everyone is a poet to the limits of his or her potentiality. Huxley became the perennial philosopher, a neo-Brahmin: the sage-like figure he initially personified parodically. His paradigmatic career took him from a Pyrrhonic silencing of outmoded poems and poets to the advocacy of a poetry of silence. (Series: "Human Potentialities". Studien zu Aldous Huxley & zeitgenossischer Kultur/Studies in Aldous Huxley & Contemporary Culture - Vol. 11)

Within the cycle that runs from Erewhon to Island, British literary utopias compete with one another to form the most persuasive picture of what the future might, or should, be like. At issue for Butler, Wells, Zamiatin, Orwell and others is whether utopia, be it positive or negative, is essentially prediction or hypothesis. Huxley contributed to this debate at roughly fifteen-year intervals, his three utopias becoming its key texts. In addition, Aldous Huxley and Utopia examines ironic cure scenes, the obsession with golf in the brave new world, attitudes towards death in Brave New World and Island, problems with names and history in the former, the role of islands in both, the detrimental impact of Madame Blavatsky and young Krishnamurti on the story of Pala, and the significance of a zoological conclusion of Island.

Volume 17/18 begins with a section containing original Huxley documents: Below the Equator, an unpublished film story collaboration by Isherwood and Huxley, edited by James Sexton and Bernfried Nugel, to be followed by two pieces rediscovered and edited by James Sexton, viz. The Heroes, William R. Cox's screenplay adaptation of a lost Huxley story, and the translation of a 1960 interview held in French by the Canadian writer Hubert Aquin. Then Huxley nephew Piero Ferrucci kindly opens his family archives of original Huxley letters and photographs and contributes a remarkable essay on his coming of age with Aldous Huxley. Rounding off this section, Peter Wood introduces an unknown 1934 letter Huxley wrote to Ren'e Schickele, a forgotten German author in the writers' community at Sanary. The second section presents a further selection of papers from the Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium held at Almer'a in April 2017 as well as other critical articles.

Configuring Romanticism focuses on the ways in which “Romanticism” continues to change shape in light of new discoveries, new readings, new approaches. To this end, some essays here gathered offer novel interpretations of Romantic “classics” such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Southey, or discuss the Celtic roots of Romanticism. Others address the relationship of Romantic literature, particularly the work of Scott, Shelley, and De Quincey, to issues of colonialism and imperialism. Yet others trace the “afterlife” of Romanticism and the Romantics, specifically Byron, Shelley, and Keats, in the writings of Leigh Hunt, Elizabeth Gaskell, James Thomson, Algernon Swinburne, William Michael Rosetti, James Clarence Mangan, Francis Parkman, Gilbert and Sullivan, and T.S. Eliot, as well as in Dutch nineteenth-century criticism. The volume closes with discussions of the Romantic aspects of World War II propaganda, twentieth-century translations of the Aeneid in view of Romantic principles, the Romantic face of recent Québecois fiction, and present-day film versions of Jane Austen’s Emma.

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer who spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Huxley was a humanist but was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life, he was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. THE NOVELS Crome Yellow Antic Hay Those Barren Leaves Point Counter Point Brave New World Eyeless in Gaza After Many a Summer Time Must Have a Stop Ape and Essence The Genius and the Goddess Island THE TRANSLATION A Virgin Heart by Remy de Gourmont THE SHORTER FICTION Limbo Mortal Coils Little Mexican Two or Three Graces Brief Candles Miscellaneous Short Stories SELECTED NON-FICTION The Olive Tree and Other Essays The Perennial Philosophy Science, Liberty and Peace The Devils of Loudun The Doors of Perception Heaven and Hell Brave New World Revisited THE MEMOIR The Art of Seeing

The visionary legacy of Aldous Huxley is as relevant today as ever. Huxley possessed a sober understanding of the human condition as well as an inspired vision of the human potential. This volume presents an interdisciplinary examination and appreciation of Aldous Huxley’s three visionary novels – Brave New World (1932), Ape and Essence (1948), and Island (1962) – to reveal the extent to which Huxley’s prognoses into our possible futures was prophetic. The author assesses each novel to reveal the foresights that define our current educational, social, religious, political, and economic institutions, while also exposing our conflicts within those institutions. This volume examines the educational, cultural and technological changes that have shaped our society since Huxley’s work, with special reference to the enduring legacy of educational philosopher John Dewey. It offers profound insights into the educational forces and moral foundations of our society that shape us, both inside and outside of our schools. It is the first of its kind to focus exclusively on all three of Huxley’s visionary novels and detail their relevance to our world today.

This book assesses key works of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, including Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to demonstrate that the major authors of this genre locate empathy and morality in eroticism. Taken together, these books delineate a subset of politically conscious speculative literature, which can be understood collectively as projected political fiction. While Thomas Horan addresses problematic aspects of this subgenre, particularly sexist and racist stereotypes, he also highlights how some of these texts locate social responsibility in queer and other non-heteronormative sexual relationships. In these novels, even when the illicit relationship itself is truncated, sexual desire fosters hope and community.

Contributed papers presented at a national seminar.

Aldous Huxley Annual is the official organ of the Aldous Huxley Society at the Center for Aldous Huxley Studies in Munster, Germany. The Society publishes essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. Volume 9 is the first to have a Guest Editor: Professor James Sexton. Sexton opens this issue with "A New Huxley Miscellany," which is followed by a selection of lectures from the Fourth International Aldous Huxley Symposium held in Los Angeles in July/August 2008. The issue closes with the first Peter Edgerly Firchow Memorial Prize Essay by Brian Smith of Suffolk University. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol. 9)