George Woodcock

In "Dawn and the Darkest Hour," poet and author George Woodcock explores the famously complex life and career of Aldous Huxley. A brilliant and satirical novelist of ideas; a popular journalist and essayist on scientific and political subjects; a prophet of the future ("Brave New World"); a pioneer of psychedelic experimentation ("The Doors of Perception"), Huxley was a man plagued by excessive intellectual curiosity and a withdrawn melancholic nature. In the dramatic range of his characters and the encyclopedic quality of his thought, Huxley expressed some of the most interesting and disturbing commentary about the condition of human beings and their relationship to society. As Woodcock traced the progress of Huxley's works, he recognized attempts to bring about a synthesis of knowledge "that would give total meaning to existence." In this striking and encompassing critical biography, Woodcock persuasively asks us to reconsider Huxley's works as the stages of "a spiritual pilgrimage," as he demonstrates that Huxley's entire remarkable "oeuvre" must be taken as a whole, as a unified "movement out of darkness toward light." It is a fascinating journey that provides a window into Huxley's life and character, that shows an intellectual continually striving for knowledge--intuitive, scientific and otherwise--and as such, is certain to renew interest in one of the most the most important and influential minds of the twentieth century. George Woodcock (1912 1995)--award-winning poet, author, essayist and widely known as a literary journalist and historian--published more than 90 titles on history, biography, philosophy, poetry and literary criticism.

Virginia Woolf said of The Egoist: 'Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed ... He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind.' In this, the most dazzlingly intellectual of all his novels, Meredith tries to illuminate the pretensions of the most powerful class within the very citadel of security which its members have built. He develops to their logical extremity his ideas on egoism, on sentimentality and on the power of comedy. Meredith saw egoism as the great enemy of truth, feeling and progress, and comedy as the great dissolver of artifice. The Egoist is the extreme expression of his recurrent theme: the defeat of egoism by the power of comedy.

This volume contains two uniquely Canadian stories of exile. Whether portraying the romantic lovers in The Island of Demons, or the political revolutionary Gabriel Dumont in Six Dry Cakes for the Hunted, the plays are related by their underlying themes. From the earliest days of settlement in Canada, those who have adhered to their ties to colonial power have consistently demanded the banishment of all those whose vision originates in commitment to the particulars of the "new land." It is not so much their acts, but rather the context of thought and imagination from which they act, that leads to the exile of the protagonists in these two plays.