Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy : The Making of GKC, 1874-1908.
Title:
Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy : The Making of GKC, 1874-1908.
Author:
Oddie, William.
ISBN:
9780191564314
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (412 pages)
Contents:
Contents -- Abbreviations for Works Most Frequently Cited -- PART I -- Introduction -- 1. The Man with the Golden Key, 1874-83 -- 'The permanent anticipation of surprise' -- The view through the proscenium arch -- 'Literary Composition among Boys' -- The realism of fairyland -- 'The white light of wonder' -- 2. School Days: St Paul's and the JDC, 1883-92 -- Putting up a smokescreen -- The genius of St Paul's -- 'Don't you wish that you were me?' -- 'A literary faculty which might come to something' -- The emergence of a theo-philanthropist -- Reform, revolution, and the religion of mankind -- Travels into an uncertain time -- 3. Nightmare at the Slade: Digging for the Sunrise of Wonder, 1892-4 -- Revolution and reform -- 'A sick cloud upon the soul' -- A 'mystical minimum of gratitude' -- 4. Beginning the Journey round the World, 1894-9 -- 'A faith to hold to and a gospel to preach' -- A penny plain and twopence coloured: the return to Skelt -- 'The tremendous Everything that is anywhere' -- Moving on -- ' . . . who brought the Cross to me' -- PART II -- 5. Who is GKC? 1900-2 -- 'No one ever had such friends as I had' -- 'The twiformed monster . . . the Chesterbelloc' -- Paradox and the democracy of truth -- 'Gilbert Chesterton': is it a pseudonym? Greybeards at Play and The Wild Knight -- Early journalism: The Speaker and The Daily News, 1900-1 -- 'The Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age' -- Patriotism and anti-imperialism I -- Early married life -- 6. The Man of Letters as Defender of the Faith, 1903-4: Robert Browning -- Blatchford I -- The Napoleon of Notting Hill -- The 'drift towards orthodoxy' -- Defender of the faith I: the Blatchford controversy (1903) -- Patriotism and anti-imperialism II -- The Napoleon of Notting Hill -- 7. The Critic as Polemicist, 1904-6: G. F. Watts -- Blatchford II -- Heretics -- The Ball and the Cross.
Charles Dickens -- Defender of the faith II: the Blatchford controversy (1904) -- Heretics: why 'man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas' -- The Ball and the Cross -- Liberal politics and liberal principles: the general election of 1906 -- Charles Dickens and the triumph of 'vulgar optimism' -- 8. Battles in the Last Crusade, 1907-8: The Man who was Thursday and Orthodoxy -- The Man who was Thursday -- The war over the creeds: Gore, Scott Holland, and Campbell -- Becoming Everyman -- The thrilling romance of orthodoxy -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Y.
Abstract:
Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is an exploration of G.K. Chesterton's imaginative and spiritual development, from his early childhood in the 1870s to his intellectual maturity in the first decade of the twentieth century. William Oddie draws extensively on Chesterton's unpublished letters and notebooks, his journalism, and his early classic writings. - ;On the publication of Orthodoxy in 1908, Wilfrid Ward hailed G. K. Chesterton as a prophetic figure whose thought was to be classed with that Burke, Butler, Coleridge, and John Henry Newman. When Chesterton died in 1936, T. S. Eliot pronounced that 'Chesterton's social and economic ideas were the ideas for his time that were fundamentally Christian and Catholic'. But how did he come by these ideas? Eliot noted that Chesterton attached 'significance also to his development, to his. beginnings as well as to his ends, and to the movement from one to the other'. It is on that development that this book is focused. Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is an exploration of G.K. Chesterton's imaginative and spiritual development, from his early childhood in the 1870s to his intellectual maturity in the first decade of the twentieth century. William Oddie draws extensively on Chesterton's unpublished letters and notebooks, his journalism, and his early classic writings, to reveal the writer in his own words. In the first major study of Chesterton to draw on this source material, Oddie charts the. progression of Chesterton's ideas from his first story (composed at the age of three and dictated to his aunt Rose) to his apologetic masterpiece Orthodoxy, in which he openly established the intellectual foundations on which the prolific writing of his last three decades would build. Part One explores the years of Chesterton's obscurity; his childhood, his adolescence, his years as a student and a
young adult. Part Two examines Chesterton's emergence on to the public stage, his success as one of the leading journalists of his day, and his growing renown as a man of letters. Written to engage all with an interest in Chesterton's life and times, Oddie's accessible style ably conveys the warmth and subtlety of thought that delighted the first readership of the enigmatic. GKC. - ;William Oddie's Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy gives a deeper understanding of its subject's thought, and the background to it, than any book since Chesterton's Autobiography in 1936...Dr Oddie brings out Chesterton's left-wing presuppositions and his astonishing gift for sharp insights - Christopher Howse The Spectator;William Oddie's book, while intensely serious in its aim, and covering a wide variety of sacred topics, serves to remind us that Chesterton was incapable of writing a dull sentence, or composing a paragraph in which the germ of laughter did not exist...Oddie's book, when completed, should give him a new lease of literary life. - Paul Johnson, Literary Review;Oddie has produced an abundance of new material to substantiate his picture - A. N. Wilson, The Times Online;This is the most convincing account of the development of Chesterton's mind yet published. - Christopher Howse, The Tablet;This seminal book should revolutionize Chesterton studies. Oddie has worked from barely explored sources and made important discoveries. This is the most original and serious work of research since Maisie Ward's pioneering biography of 1944. - Ian Ker, University of Oxford.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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