Thomas Wolfe

This paper explores the creative impact of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922) on Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935). Specifically, it addresses similarities in their cinematic representations of the stream of consciousness that demonstrate practice of the 'camera-eye' as an intermedial focalisation technique, with Wolfe building on Joyce's earlier methods. This paper is concerned with how the camera-eye mediates the stream of consciousness of the autobiographical focaliser - Stephen Dedalus in Portrait and Ulysses, and Eugene Gant in Angel and River - as moving visual images.

“Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel  rose like a meteor on the national literary horizon, but burst like a bombshell in Asheville, NC in 1929. It provided an exciting distraction, perhaps, from the economic crash of that year” (Trotti 517). Although Wolfe's debut novel covers a period predating the Wall Street Crash, the narrative starting in the mid-1890s, covering the turn of the century, and the story being interrupted in 1918, this thesis argues that Look Homeward, Angel does not function as a distraction from the worries of the Great Depression. On the contrary to Trotti’s statement, it is shown that the novel conveys how liberalism, its mindset as well as its material and structural manifestations, gave rise to the destructive forms of individuation leading up to the crash. In doing so, I challenge three well-established claims about Wolfe’s early work. Namely, that it does not engage with Hegelian philosophy, that it shows little concern for politico-economic questions, and that it are anything but modernistic texts. I explore how all these aspects are, in fact, related. It is the work’s Hegelian ontology, or loss of faith therein, that shapes its fragmented form as a reaction to the trauma of the war and the entrepreneurial spirit it facilitated, but which had already been announced by a transition of economic paradigms. In order to reach these conclusions, this thesis equally engages in the debate regarding Wolfe’s conception of fiction as autobiography. It is here claimed that we should read his work as a fly-ribbon trying to capture the full experience of life, including that which is lived in reading, and thus also the reading of philosophy.

The more fundamental questions this reading of Wolfe raises are to what extent economic paradigm shifts are lived as traumatic, almost war-like, experiences, as well as whether this is only the effect of a transition, or the more substantial particularities of specific economic eras, liberalism in this case.

Thomas Wolfe, an author in the Southern Literary Renaissance, was not like the Southern writers that preceded him. These foregoing authors focused on historical romances, purportedly valiant efforts by Confederate soldiers, and the antebellum Southern condition. This historical writing, firmly rooted in the traditionally Southern rhetorical style (a method, as Allen Tate argued in his 1959 essay “A Southern Mode of the Imagination,” of writing based on persuasion and oratory) began to diminish as the South witnessed several crucial events: the abolition of slavery, the defeat of the Confederate forces, and Reconstruction [1865-1877].

PDF available here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:48026/datastreams/CONTENT/content
*****  A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, "Passage to England" was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain amount of editing it was arguably more genuinely Wolfean than his later and more renowned works. As a matter of fact, while the text possesses such characteristic traits as a fragmented narrative form, an interweave of reality and fiction, and the lack of a definite plot, it also tackles and anticipates a whole series of ideas and issues that Wolfe would deal with, albeit to a lesser extent, in subsequent books.  *****

Considering autobiographical narrative as a specific form of fiction whose material springs from the author’s personal and individual experience, which represents one of the major artistic trends throughout the 20th century, the paper analyses Thomas Wolfe’s The Story of a Novel alongside Christopher Isherwood’s similar though different autobiographical and artistic experience. Attacked by decades of criticism of being too dedicated to personal issues in his wok, Wolfe’s defence stresses the importance of the autobiographical issue for his narrative and defines as perfectly legitimate the employment of elements referable to the author’s personal experience. “Where does the material of an artist come from? What are the proper uses of that material, and how far must his freedom in the use of that material be controlled by his responsibility as a member of society?”: questions as such are at the core itself of the artistic discourse of both these writers. Whereas Isherwood’s autobiographical route starts from an initial interest and preoccupation for the incidental situation of the 1930s, and moves to a spiritual and intimist quest after his 1939 emigration to the States and conversion to Vedanta Hinduism, Wolfe’s movement is rather from the intimist and personal to the social and universal.

Per quanto svariati testi canonici occidentali possano essere considerati in sostanza autobiografici, almeno due autori, seppur diversi per tanti aspetti, hanno fatto dell'autobiografismo il loro cavallo di battaglia. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) afferma esplicitamente in una sua dichiarazione di poetica che «a man has got to use what is his own if what he does has value and he cannot use what is not his own». Anche un autore pur tanto diverso come Carlo Dossi (1849-1910), creatore di una lingua propria, sente la necessità artistica, se non ancor prima psicologica, di scrivere di e per se stesso.

Following the death of Thomas Wolfe in 1938, the author’s controversial enthusiasm for Nazi Germany was overlooked in light of the patriotic fervour of his final writing. Wolfe’s paeans to the American continent were quickly appropriated into scripts for CBS radio plays, or bundled up as poetical passages in books like the Literary Guild’s The Face of the Nation (1939), while critics like Alfred Kazin reinforced the view that Wolfe believed himself to be a “prime symbol of American experience.” Drawing on the recent, growing awareness of Wolfe’s indebtedness to German culture and writing—itself a product of the broader transnational turn in literary studies—this paper seeks to put to rest the notion that the novelist traced a trajectory from Nazi sympathy to outright antipathy. It argues instead that Wolfe’s romanticized vision of Germany was not replaced by a critical realism in response to Nazism, but instead operated in conjunction with his growing sense of unease. This paper traces the panoply of patriotic Wolfe-appropriations—radio plays to sell war bonds, editions for the armed services, orchestral pieces for naval bands—in order to interrogate these acts of rewriting and to come to terms with the politics of active misreadings in a time of war. Importantly, this paper also explores a hitherto unexamined German translation of Wolfe’s most ardently anti-Nazi story, “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” offering an alternative reading of Wolfe’s politics through the eyes of Jewish novelist, translator, and exile, Rudolf Frank. Frank’s excised and censored wartime translation reveals the degree to which Wolfe’s vision of the American continent was achingly near to the Blut un Boden (Blood and Soil) literature that propagandized German ideals of the Volk: the Germany that expelled Frank as it welcomed Wolfe.

Thomas Stearns Eliot is the American poet and critic who wrote of a " mythical method " at the beginning of the 20 th century to describe the task of the best writers of the modernist period, which starts after World War I. The characteristics of this method are briefly studied here as they appear in his long poem entitled The Waste Land. Then the article studies the way the American novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe used the mythic element in order to write a single and long epic work that might prove useful in times of postwar distress.

Law) battle it out and a fraternal or paternal love develops between editor and writer that grounds Look Homeward Angel (1929) as a canon of American literature. It is Thomas Wolfe's first novel, a bildungsroman, coming-of-age literary piece and the writer-editor relationship is portrayed beautifully in the film Genius (2016) Based on Wolfe's boardinghouse past with his mother in Asheville, North Carolina, after his father, an alcoholic, suddenly passed away, Angel is autobiographical testimony to Wolfe's true grit and resilience. In real life, he escapes this past to study at Harvard and write for a living in New York, but it is always with him.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was one of the most influential southern writers, widely considered to rival his contemporary, William Faulkner-who believed Wolfe to be one of the greatest talents of their generation. His novels- including Look Homeward, Angel (1929); Of Time and the River (1935); and the posthumously published The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940)-remain touchstones of U.S. literature.

In Look Abroad, Angel, Jedidiah Evans uncovers the "global Wolfe," reconfiguring Wolfe's supposedly intractable homesickness for the American South as a form of longing that is instead indeterminate and expansive. Instead of promoting and reinforcing a narrow and cloistered formulation of the writer as merely southern or Appalachian, Evans places Wolfe in transnational contexts, examining Wolfe's impact and influence throughout Europe. In doing so, he de-territorializes the response to Wolfe's work, revealing the writer as a fundamentally global presence within American literature.

“The mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices.” So writes Harold Bloom in his influential—though much disparaged—work, The Anxiety of Influence (1973). The resurrection of the dead is an apt description of our incessant urge to frame new writers in light old ones: eponymous adjectives abound like incantations, calling up ghosts to haunt the pages of new novels. Dickensian. Joycean. Kafkaesque. While there is no shortage of Virgilian guides to offer up as examples of Bloom’s vision of return, the resurrections are almost always incidental: the presence of the deceased is meant to be unquestioned, even unexceptional, an opportunity for the author to “do the Police in different voices.” But housed in the Spring 1950 edition of science-fiction pulp, Planet Stories—following Keith Bennett’s implausibly titled novella, “The Rocketeers have Shaggy Ears” (“a gripping novel of Earthlings lost in Alien savagery”)—is a story of author-resurrection that literalizes Bloom’s return of the dead, and in so doing illuminates the peculiar reception history of the author it revives. That story is Ray Bradbury’s “Forever and the Earth,” and its unlikely, reanimated hero is the author Thomas Wolfe. This paper investigates the pulp-author as fan, tracing the young Bradbury’s obsessive love for Wolfe, and revealing how the future laureate of Mars revivified an Appalachian romantic, and sent him into space.