Process

by Boyle, Kay

• ISBN13: 9780252026683
• ISBN10: 0252026683
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Process is the first novel written by Kay Boyle, one of the most enduring writers of modernist American literature. Written in 1924 and 1925, when Boyle was a young American living in France, Process was circulating among potential publishers when the manuscript disappeared. Three-quarters of a century later, Sandra Spanier, preeminent authority on Boyle, discovered a carbon copy of it while preparing an edition of Boyle's letters. Set off by Spanier's substantial introduction, it is published here for the first time.Process is a classic Bildungsroman and "a portrait of the artist as a young woman." Like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Kerith Day is a sensitive youth, self-consciously in search of her own identity and place in the world. Observing with a keen and critical eye the dreary industrial landscape and the beaten-down inhabitants of her native Cincinnati, Ohio, Kerith determines to discover something better. She sets off for France, where workers and radicals are on the same side, and places her faith in art and politics.This lyrical first novel captures the passionate indignation and urgency to independence that propelled the young Kay Boyle toward radical politics and literary experimentation. Part of the legendary circle of expatriate writers and artists in Paris in the 1920s, Boyle published some of her early poetry and fiction in the avant-garde little magazines, alongside the work of Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway. After the appearance of Boyle's first published novel in 1931, Katherine Anne Porter signaled her as one of the "most portentous" talents of her generation.Like other cutting-edge work of its time, Process pushes the envelope of genre, blurring the boundary between fiction and poetry. Spanier calls this long-lost first novel the purest, most sustained example we have of Boyle's high modernist work. Its recovery marks a significant addition to the body of early twentieth-century American literature. As a political novel that predates the radical literature of the 1930s, as a novel of development written by an American woman, and as a startlingly innovative experiment, Process is a pivotal text for reassessing literary modernism.

Table of Contents

An Early Bed	p. 3
The Holiday	p. 4
The Car Cemetery	p. 5
To A Married Sister	p. 6
Soot	p. 7
The New Estate	p. 8
Dresden	p. 11
Judgement	p. 16
Calvin Klein's Obsession	p. 19
Whatever Sleep It Is	p. 23
Belfast Confetti	p. 25
August 1969	p. 26
Campaign	p. 27
Slate Street School	p. 27
Asylum	p. 28
Loaf	p. 35
'Plains and mountains, skies ...'	p. 38
Snow	p. 38
'Eleven horsemen ...'	p. 39
Ambition	p. 40
'Darkness never flows ...'	p. 44
Hairline Crack	p. 44
Bloody Hand	p. 45
The Knee	p. 46
'I've just put on this ...'	p. 46
Bed-Time Story	p. 47
'Wild rough seas tonight ...'	p. 49
Hamlet	p. 49
Second Language	p. 55
Two to Tango	p. 59
Drunk Boat (after Rimbaud)	p. 62
The Ballad of HMS Belfast	p. 66
Eesti	p. 73
Letters from the Alphabet: D,H,K,L,M,O,S,U,Y,Z	p. 74
Graecum Est: Non Legitur	p. 84
Cave Quid Dicis, Quando, et Cui	p. 85
Labuntur et Imputantur	p. 86
Quod Erat Demonstrandum	p. 87
The Poet as Snow-Merchant (after Stefan Augustin Doinas)	p. 88
A Pair	p. 89
Opera: Delta, Oscar, Tango, Zulu	p. 89
The Sleeper in the Valley (after Rimbaud)	p. 94
On the Road (after Rimbaud)	p. 96
Travellers (after Baudelaire)	p. 98
The Lid (after Baudelaire)	p. 100
O Happy Death (after Baudelaire)	p. 102
At the Sign of the Swan (after Mallarme)	p. 104
The Sonneteer (after Mallarme)	p. 106
The Maid of Brobdingnag (after Baudelaire)	p. 108
I Had a Life (after Baudelaire)	p. 110
The Dongless Bell (after Baudelaire)	p. 112
Beauty (after Baudelaire)	p. 114
Tib's Eve	p. 119
The Poppy Battle	p. 120
Salt of the Earth	p. 120
Nine Hostages	p. 121
The Rising of the Moon	p. 122
The Rising Sun	p. 122
Dark Rosaleen	p. 123
The Tailor's Twist	p. 124
Catmint Tea	p. 124
1798	p. 125
1998	p. 126
Sake	p. 126
Digitalis	p. 127
Sayers, or, Both Saw Wonder	p. 128
Crack	p. 128
Twelfth Day	p. 129
The Ay O'Haitch	p. 130
The Londonderry Air	p. 130
Fear	p. 131
Fuji Film	p. 132
Picador	p. 132
Mustard	p. 133
The Display Case	p. 134
The Groves of Blarney	p. 134
Banners	p. 135
Spraying the Potatoes	p. 136
Heart of Oak	p. 136
Envoy	p. 137
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.