Download or read book Aspects of Robertson Davies Novels written by Victor J. Lams and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Completing the survey begun in Lams' Cornish Trilogy volume, Aspects of Robertson Davies' Novels discusses the Salterton and Deptford trilogies along with Davies' last two novels, Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man. The apprentice effort Tempest-Tost and the journeyman's success Leaven of Malice were followed by Davies' first genuinely fine novel, A Mixture of Frailties, the story of a talented Salterton girl who becomes a world-famous soprano. The Deptford trilogy is discussed in terms of Northrop Frye's «confession» form as it appears in Fifth Business, and in variations of that form in The Manticore and World of Wonders. Although Davies' Jungian enthusiasms produced certain flaws to which readers have objected, Murther & Walking Spirits is by no means a failure; it is best understood as an implicit spiritual history of Canada which is adumbrated in the generational experience of a single Canadian family. The Cunning Man concludes Davies' career with a narrative as rewardingly complex as any of the Cornish trilogy novels.
Download or read book World of Wonders written by Robertson Davies and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-02-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link Hailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a modern classic," Robertson Davies’s acclaimed Deptford Trilogy is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven. World of Wonders—the third book in the series after The Manticore—follows the story of Magnus Eisengrim—the most illustrious magician of his age—who is spirited away from his home by a member of a traveling sideshow, the Wanless World of Wonders. After honing his skills and becoming better known, Magnus unfurls his life’s courageous and adventurous tale in this third and final volume of a spectacular, soaring work. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book The Rebel Angels written by Robertson Davies and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available as an eBook for the first time, The Rebel Angels is the first book in the celebrated Cornish Trilogy. Gypsies, defrocked monks, mad professors, and wealthy eccentrics—a remarkable cast peoples Robertson Davies’ brilliant spectacle of theft, perjury, murder, scholarship, and love at a modern university. Only Davies, author of Fifth Business, could have woven together their destinies with such wit, humour, and wisdom.
Download or read book What s Bred in the Bone written by Robertson Davies and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called “an altogether remarkable creation, his most accomplished novel to date” (The New York Times), What's Bred in the Bone is the second brilliant novel in Robertson Davies’ The Cornish Trilogy. Available as an eBook for the first time. Francis Cornish was always good at keeping secrets. From the well-hidden family secret of his childhood to his mysterious encounters with a small-town embalmer, a master art restorer, a Bavarian countess, and various masters of espionage, the events in Francis’s life were not always what they seemed. In this wonderfully ingenious portrait of an art expert and collector of international renown, Robertson Davies has created a spellbinding tale of artistic triumph and heroic deceit. It is a tale told in stylish, elegant prose, endowed with lavish portions of Davies’ wit and wisdom. “Davies’s make-believe universe has the appeal of a mystic’s vision… What’s Bred in the Bone is vintage Davies.” The Globe and Mail
Download or read book The Lyre of Orpheus written by Robertson Davies and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as a literary masterpiece, Robertson Davies' The Cornish Trilogy comes to a brilliant conclusion in The Lyre of Orpheus. Available as an eBook for the first time. There is an important decision to be made. The Cornish Foundation is thriving under the directorship of Arthur Cornish when Arthur and his beguiling wife, Maria Theotoky, decide to undertake a project worthy of Francis Cornish– connoisseur, collector, and notable eccentric–whose vast fortune endows the Foundation. The grumpy, grimy, extraordinarily talented music student Hulda Schnakenburg is commissioned to complete E.T.A. Hoffmann’s unfinished opera Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold; and the scholarly priest Simon Darcourt finds himself charged with writing the libretto. Complications both practical and emotional arise: the gypsy in Maria’s blood rises with a vengeance; Darcourt stoops to petty crime; and various others indulge in perjury, blackmail, and other unsavory pursuits. Hoffmann’s dictum, “the lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld,” seems to be all too true—especially when the long-hidden secrets of Francis Cornish himself are finally revealed. Baroque and deliciously funny, this third book in The Cornish Trilogy shows Robertson Davies at his very considerable best.
Download or read book Manticore written by Robertson Davies and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second novel in Robertson Davies’ critically acclaimed Deptford Trilogy, The Manticore is a fascinating exploration, by an exquisite stylist, of those regions beyond reason where monsters live. Available as an eBook for the first time. David Staunton, the son of Percy Boyd Staunton, travels to Switzerland. As he undergoes Jungian analysis for a lifetime of unhappiness and the trauma left by the death of his father, he repeatedly encounters a manticore—a monster with the head of a man, the body of lion, and the tail of a scorpion. “He is to say the least a mature and wise writer.” Anthony Burgess
Download or read book The Cunning Man written by Robertson Davies and published by RosettaBooks. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An amazing coup . . . a brilliant, never less than engaging work of fiction which is also a philosophical meditation on the business of living."-Financial Times When Father Hobbes mysteriously dies at the high alter on Good Friday, Dr. Jonathan Hullah-whose holistic work has earned him the label "Cunning Man" (for the wizard of folk tradition)-wants to know why. The physician-cum-diagnostician's search for answers compels him to look back over his own long life. He conjures vivid memories of the dazzling, intellectual high-jinks and compassionate philosophies of himself and his circle, including flamboyant, mystical curate Charlie Iredale; cynical, quixotic professor Brocky Gilmartin; outrageous banker Darcy Dwyer; and jocular, muscular artist Pansy Todhunter. In compelling and hilarious scenes from the divine comedy of life, The Cunning Man reveals profound truths about being human. "Wise, humane and consistently entertaining . . . Robertson Davies's skill and curiosity are as agile as ever, and his store of incidental knowledge is a constant pleasure."-The New York Times Book Review "The sparkling history of [the] erudite and amusing Dr. Hullah, who knows the souls of his patients as well as he knows their bodies . . . never fails to enlighten and delight."-The London Free Press "Davies is a good companion. Settling into The Cunning Man is like taking a comfortable chair opposite a favorite uncle who has seen and done everything."-Maclean's "Irresistible, unflaggingly vital. A wholehearted and sharp-minded celebration of the Great Theatre of Life."-The Sunday Times "A novel brimming with themes of music, poetry, beauty, philosophy, death and the deep recesses of the mind."-The Observer
Download or read book Fifth Business written by Robertson Davies and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Murther and Walking Spirits written by Robertson Davies and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Murther & Walking Spirits is available as an eBook for the first time. “I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.” So begins the unusual story of Connor “Gil” Gilmartin when he catches his wife in flagrante with the Sniffer, his former colleague and now his murderer. Though he is struck dead in the very first line of this novel, death is only the first indignity Gil is about to suffer. For he lingers on as a ghost, and from this bleak vantage–made even less endurable by the fact that he must spend the afterlife sitting beside his killer at a film festival–he is forced to view the exploits and failures of his ancestors, from the forerunners who sailed up the Hudson to Canada during the American Revolution right up to his university-professor parents.
Download or read book Conversations with Robertson Davies written by Robertson Davies and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1989 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversations with Robertson Davies is a long overdue anthology of interviews with Canada's most respected literary figure. Journalist, essayist, reviewer, playwright, and novelist, Robertson Davies has not only been a leading figure in Canadian literature since World War II, but, since the publication of Fifth Business in 1970, he has become known throughout the world. Conversations with Robertson Davies will be of interest both to the student of Canadian literature and culture and to the scholar examining Davies's plays and novels as well as to the general reader who would like to know more about the awesome man behind the Salterton and Deptford trilogies, What's Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus. A majority of this anthology of twenty-eight interviews has never before appeared in print. Along with these previously unpublished interviews, the reader finds a selection of the best print interviews: Tom Harpur of the Toronto Star proves Davies's spiritual beliefs, Ann Saddlemyer looks into his dreams, and author Terence M. Green questions Davies on the supernatural.
Download or read book The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies written by Robertson Davies and published by New York : Penguin ; Markham, Ont. : Penguin Books Canada. This book was released on 1991 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in the U.S. last year, this updated collection contains the best of Robertson Davies' newspaper and magazine articles written over the past 50 years. "Each piece is entertaining and enlightening. . . ".--Publishers Weekly.
Download or read book High Spirits written by Robertson Davies and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fruits of an eighteen-year tradition of Massey College’s annual Gaudy Nights, Robertson Davies’ High Spirits still delights and amuses to this day. Published as an eBook for the first time. In the Introduction to this collection of charming stories, Robertson Davies notes we all need “ghosts as a dietary supplement . . . to stave off that most dreadful of modern ailments, the Rational Rickets.” In one tale, Mr. Davies introduces the ghost of Henrik Ibsen; in another, he brings us face to face with a bust of Charles Dickens, whose “scarlet lips . . . parted in a terrible smile” and whose “beard stirred in a hiccup of repletion.” Sixteen other apparitions manifest themselves, each rendered with Robertson Davies’ special touch–a bit of parody, a touch of true scariness–and all emanating from high spirits.
Download or read book What s Bred in the Bone Illustrated written by Grant Allen and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elma Clifford found herself thrust, hap-hazard, at the very last moment, into the last compartment of the last carriage of the train -- alone -- with an artist. Now, you and I, to be sure, most proverbially courteous and intelligent reader, might never have guessed at first sight, from the young man's outer aspect, the nature of his occupation. But she recognized him for what he was immediately, and she was right, and his name was Cyril Waring. He was the love of her life. Even in that first moment, Elma probably knew it. The trouble was, it seemed bound to be a short life. Before the train reached its next station, a tunnel through which it was travelling collapsed upon them. . . . All of a sudden a rapid jerk of the carriage pulled up their train unexpectedly. Elma was aware of a loud noise and a crash in front, almost instantaneously followed by a thrilling jar -- a low dull thud -- a sound of broken glass -- a quick blank stoppage. Next instant she found herself flung wildly forward into her neighbor's arms, while the artist, for his part, with outstretched hands, was vainly endeavoring to break the force of the fall for her. All she knew for the first few minutes was merely that there had been an accident to the train. Until the tunnel behind them collapsed as well, and then there was nothing either of them could do but wait. Wait, and, all but certainly, die.
Download or read book Tempest Tost written by Robertson Davies and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut novel that launched Robertson Davies’ literary career, Tempest-Tost is a magnificent display of his legendary wit. The first novel in The Salterton Trilogy is now available as an eBook for the first time. An amateur production of The Tempest provides a colourful backdrop for a hilarious look at unrequited love. Mathematics teacher Hector Mackilwraith, stirred and troubled by Shakespeare’s plays, falls in love with the beautiful Griselda Webster. When Griselda shows she has plans of her own, Hector despairs and tries to commit suicide on the play’s opening night.
Download or read book Leaven of Malice written by Robertson Davies and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, Leaven of Malice is the second novel in Robertson Davies’ much-loved Salterton Trilogy. Available as an eBook for the first time. The following announcement appeared in the Salterton Evening Bellman: “Professor and Mrs. Walter Vambrace are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Pearl Veronica, to Solomon Bridgetower, Esq., son of . . .” Although the malice that prompted this false engagement notice was aimed at three people only–Solly Bridgetower, Pearl Vambrace, and Gloster Ridley, the anxiety-ridden local newspaper editor–before the leaven of malice had ceased to work it had changed permanently, for good or ill, the lives of many citizens of Salterton. This is the second novel in The Salterton Trilogy (which also includes Tempest-Tost and A Mixture of Frailties).
Download or read book The Merry Heart written by Robertson Davies and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers around the world continue to mourn the 1995 death of a beloved literary icon, but this rich and varied collection of Robertson Davies's writings on the world of books and the miracle of language captures his inimitable voice and sustains his presence among us. Coming almost entirely from Davies? own files of unpublished material, these twenty-four essays and lectures range over themes from "The Novelist and Magic" to "Literature and Technology," from "Painting, Fiction, and Faking," to "Can a Doctor Be a Humanist?" and "Creativity in Old Age." For devotees of Davies and all lovers of literature and language, here is the "urbanity, wit, and high seriousness mixed by a master chef" (Cleveland Plain Dealer)?vintage delights from an exquisite literary menu. Davies himself says merely: "Lucky writers. . .like wine, die rich in fruitiness and delicious aftertaste, so that their works survive them." Viking will publish Robertson Davies? Happy Alchemy in July 1998 Many fine works by Robertson Davies are available from Penguin including The Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy, and The Salterton Trilogy
Download or read book Robertson Davies written by Nicholas Maes and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2009-03-23 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Thamesville, Ontario, a student at Queen’s University in Kingston in the 1930s, and editor and later publisher of the Peterborough Examiner from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, playwright, essayist, critic, professor, and novelist Robertson Davies (1913–1995) was one of Canada’s pre-eminent literary voices for more than a half-century. Davies, with his generous beard and donnish manner, was the very epitome of the “man of letters,” a term he abhorred. Best known for his Deptford Trilogy of novels (Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders), he also wrote two other trilogies (Salterton and Cornish) and was at work on the third volume of another trilogy (Toronto) when he died. With a life as rich in character and colour as that found in his fiction and essays, Davies had a great fondness for magic and myth, both of which are found in abundance in his work, along with a prodigious streak of wry humour.
