Items related to Dance to the Music of Time

Unknown Author Dance to the Music of Time ISBN 13: 9780434013050

Dance to the Music of Time - Hardcover

 
9780434013050: Dance to the Music of Time
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Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.

Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars.

Includes these novels:
A Question of Upbringing
A Buyer's Market
The Acceptance World

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

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About the Author:
Anthony Powell's work includes Miscellaneous Verdicts and Under Review, both available from the University of Chicago Press.
Review:
Twelve-volume series of novels by Anthony Powell, published from 1951 to 1975. The series--which includes A Question of Upbringing (1951), A Buyer's Market (1952), The Acceptance World (1955), At Lady Molly's (1957), Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), The Kindly Ones (1962), The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier's Art (1966), The Military Philosophers (1968), Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), Temporary Kings (1973), and Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975)--traces events in the lives of a number of characters from Britain's upper classes and bohemia, following them from adolescence in the 1920s to senescence in the 1970s. Powell found inspiration for the title and form of his opus in Nicolas Poussin's painting "A Dance to the Music of Time," which depicts the Four Seasons dancing to music played by Father Time. The novels focus on social behavior; all characters are dealt with objectively, as they would wish to appear to outside observers. Personality and motivation are revealed through minute and subtle analysis of disconnected incidents. Nicholas Jenkins, a nonparticipant who is secure in his own values, narrates much of the action of people obsessed with power, style, creativity, and public image. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

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  • PublisherWilliam Heinemann
  • ISBN 10 0434013056
  • ISBN 13 9780434013050
  • BindingHardcover

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Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1995
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