The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy

"This is one of the best short books of literary criticism that I know."â€”Journal of Aesthetics and Art CriticismWide-ranging enough to encompass Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, horses, and a man riding a bicycle while wearing a gas mask, The Counterfeiters is one of Hugh Kenner's greatest achievements. In this fascinating work of literary and cultural criticism, Kenner seeks the causes and outcomes of man's ability to simulate himself (a computer that can calculate quicker than we can) and his world (a mechanical duck that acts the same as a living one). This intertangling of art and science, of man and machine, of machine and art is at the heart of this book. He argues that the belief in art as a uniquely human expression is complicated and questioned by the prevalence of simulationsâ€”or "counterfeits"â€”in our culture. Kenner, with his characteristically accessible style and wit, brings together history, literature, science, and art to locate the personal in what is an increasingly counterfeit world.

Humor & Entertainment

Kenner, Professor Hugh

Humor

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Ulysses

With characteristic flair, Kenner explores the ways Joyce teaches us to read his novel as Joyce taught himself to write it: moving from the simple to the complex, from the familiar to the strange and new, from the norms of the nineteenth-century novel to the open forms of modernism.

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

A study of the main figurea on the literary scene in twentieth-century England, including Hardy, James, Bloomsbury, Shaw, and Empson

A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers

A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers

History & Criticism

The "homemade world" Hugh Kenner describes exists alongside the world of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot. While they were laying the international foundations of literary modernism, another modernism far more specifically American was being born in the work of William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Kenner deals in turn with each of the six, with the American conditions that shaped them, and with the peculiarly homemade strengths that led to their achievement. "A Homemade World" is a book to stimulate thought, argument, and an altogether fresh consideration of twentieth-century writing.

A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers

United States

Samuel Beckett, who wrote everything both in French and English, specialized in short enigmatic texts, implying vast visionary works of which the stories are broken pieces. Kenner's guide is designed to help readers see beyond the story in Beckett to the text as a whole and to appreciate the uniqueness of each of his works.

A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (Reader's Guides)

Syracuse University Press

An enlightening study of three writers, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians begins with an explanation of the effect of the printing press on books. The "book as book" has been removed from the oral tradition by such features as prefaces, footnotes, and indexes. Books have become voiceless in some sense--they are to be read silently, not recited aloud. How this mechanical change affected the possibilities of fiction is Kenner's subject. Each of the three featured authors approached this situation in a unique, yet connected way: Flaubert as the "Comedian of the Enlightenment," categorizing man's intellectual follies; Joyce as the "Comedian of the Inventory," with his meticulously constructed lists; and Beckett as the "Comedian of the Impasse," eliminating facts and writing novels about a man alone writing.

Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Lannan Selection)

Dalkey Archive Press

Originally published: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968.

Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (Dalkey Archive Scholarly)

"An original and entertaining study of, chiefly, Ulysses . . . This is a most stimulating book." Anthony Burgess

Joyce's Voices (American Literature Series)

One of Kenner’s earliest, and greatest, essay collections is finally available again. The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts its shadow, and Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature represents, in its author’s words,“a report on ten years’ watching of shadows.” Collecting the earliest short essays and reviews by a man who was arguably the greatest English-language critic-scholar of the twentieth century, Gnomon not only provides valuable, entertaining, and often scabrous insights into the workings of literature, as well as the books of such modern giants as William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, but is itself a cross-section of the development of Kenner’s own body of work, which in its beauty, irreverence, and disregard for convention proves him as much an artist as the men and women he spent his life championing.

Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature (Coleman Dowell American Literature)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kenner, Professor Hugh. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kenner, Professor Hugh