Description

An exploration of the myth of descent into the underworld as it informs and shapes a wide range of modern fictions. The author discovers in a series of close readings of works by Strindberg, Yeats, Conrad, Eliot, Lawrence, Mann, Lowry, Broch, and Pynchon the precipitating biographical and cultural crises leading to the symbolic association of death and the imagination. The readings are steeped in Jungian thought, but not enslaved by it. The conclusion yields insights into the essence of modernism that extend our understanding beyond literature into the arts. Contents: Introduction: The Four Chambers of the Underworld; Demon and Daimon: Strindberg, Yeats, and Conrad; T.S. Eliot: Pattern and Purgatory; Soul Making in D.H. Lawrence; Thomas Mann and the "Cult of the Sepulchre"; The Persistence of the Hades Complex; Three Contemporary Books of the Dead; Re-Visioning the Elysian Fields: Physics, Painting and Thanatology.