W. H. Davies

Essays on the Super-Tramp Poet

Rory Waterman

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781785274565
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785274589
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Though Davies is a well-known and unique literary figure of the early twentieth century, most famous now forThe Autobiography of a Super-Trampand poems such as 'Leisure', which came 14th in the BBC's search to find 'The Nation's Favourite Poems', no other volume of essays, or other critical monograph, concentrates on his work. This book not only provides a reassessment of Davies, putting him in his literary and cultural context, but also sheds light on the many more central literary figures he encountered and befriended. The central aim of the book is to reconsider his major works and his place in the literary and cultural milieu of his period.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Discovery and Rediscovery: W. H. Davies’s The Soul’s Destroyer in Context
• Chapter 2 W. H. Davies and the Tramping Character in the Autobiography of a Super-Tramp
• Chapter 3 ‘More of Imagination’s Stars’: W. H. Davies, Becoming a Georgian
• Chapter 4 ‘Not the Lingo of Fleet Street’: Davies and Periodical Culture
• Chapter 5 ‘From the Hills of Gwent’: The Other W. H. Davies
• Chapter 6 Damaged Bodies and the Cartesian Split: Unattainable Masculinity in the Prose of W. H. Davies
• Chapter 7 Women of Fashion and the Little Wife: W. H. Davies on Women
• Chapter 8 ‘The One’: Self-Representation in W. H. Davies’s Shorter Lyrics of the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 9 Scant Theologies: W. H. Davies and the Figure of Christ
• Chapter 10 ‘Poisoned Earth and Sky’: W. H. Davies, Between the Wars
• Notes on Contributors
• Index