Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is now recognized as one of the major novels of the 20th Century, whose breadth and experimental prose have influenced a wide range of contemporary writers. This study, originally published in 1984, considers the significance of the autobiographical elements in Lowry’s writing, in the context of his developing concern with fictionality and the romantic sensibility. It gives special attention to his exotic many-sided masterpiece and discusses the ways in which the narrative’s reflexive games-playing elements affect the representation of character, history, myth and magic. It surveys Lowry’s late experimental novels and stories and considers how their metafictional aspects anticipate some key interests of contemporary writing.
1.The Lowry Myth 2. Under the Volcano: Modernism and the Self 3. Under the Volcano: Modernism and Form 4. Metafictions Appendix: The Film of Under the Volcano.
Biography
Ronald Binns has taught at the University of Ilorin and the University of Portsmouth and written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Times Higher Education Supplement, Critical Quarterly and many other publications. He is the editor of George Gascoigne: Selected Poems, and the author of Orwell in Southwold: His Life and Writings in a Suffolk Town, Malcolm Lowry, J. G. Farrell, Elizabeth, Shakespeare and the Castle: The Story of the Kenilworth Revels and Gascoigne: The Life of a Tudor Poet.
Original Review of Malcolm Lowry:
‘An engaged and energetic survey of Lowry’s work, concentrating largely on Under the Volcan but also usefully discussing the rest of the corpus, especially the early short stories…Binns offers an admirable condensed spy-hole onto Lowry’s work.’ Malcolm Lowry Review
