Bernfried Nugel

Jerome Meckier

Aldous Huxley Annual is the official organ of the Aldous Huxley Society at the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies in Munster, Germany. It publishes essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. It aspires to be the sort of periodical that Huxley would have wanted to read and to which he might have contributed. This issue opens with four unknown or little-known short stories by Aldous Huxley: "The Nun's Tragedy" (ca. 1921), "Over the Telephone" (1922), "Nine A.M." (1924), and "Consider the Lilies" (1954). These stories are followed by a selection of lectures from the Fourth International Aldous Huxley Symposium held in Los Angeles in July 2008, together with an article on Brave New World as a parody and satire of Wells, Ford, Freud and Behaviourism in advanced foreign language teaching. The issue closes with another lecture from the Los Angeles Symposium on Huxley as environmental prophet.

Volume 8 (2008)

Aldous Huxley Annual

Volume 17/18 begins with a section containing original Huxley documents: Below the Equator, an unpublished film story collaboration by Isherwood and Huxley, edited by James Sexton and Bernfried Nugel, to be followed by two pieces rediscovered and edited by James Sexton, viz. The Heroes, William R. Cox's screenplay adaptation of a lost Huxley story, and the translation of a 1960 interview held in French by the Canadian writer Hubert Aquin. Then Huxley nephew Piero Ferrucci kindly opens his family archives of original Huxley letters and photographs and contributes a remarkable essay on his coming of age with Aldous Huxley. Rounding off this section, Peter Wood introduces an unknown 1934 letter Huxley wrote to Ren'e Schickele, a forgotten German author in the writers' community at Sanary. The second section presents a further selection of papers from the Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium held at Almer'a in April 2017 as well as other critical articles.

Volume 17/18 (2017/2018)

Within the cycle that runs from Erewhon to Island, British literary utopias compete with one another to form the most persuasive picture of what the future might, or should, be like. At issue for Butler, Wells, Zamiatin, Orwell and others is whether utopia, be it positive or negative, is essentially prediction or hypothesis. Huxley contributed to this debate at roughly fifteen-year intervals, his three utopias becoming its key texts. In addition, Aldous Huxley and Utopia examines ironic cure scenes, the obsession with golf in the brave new world, attitudes towards death in Brave New World and Island, problems with names and history in the former, the role of islands in both, the detrimental impact of Madame Blavatsky and young Krishnamurti on the story of Pala, and the significance of a zoological conclusion of Island.

Aldous Huxley and Utopia

Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else's—usually Charles Dickens's. Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view. For his part, Dickens—determined to remain inimitable—replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his. Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction

Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier's acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens's novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors' themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar's collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era's Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens's tragicomic view of the world.

Misnar's Pavilion versus Cinderella

Dickens's Great Expectations

Volume 15 is dedicated to Prof David Bradshaw (Oxford University), who died on 13 September 2016 after a long illness. His last article is published at the beginning of this issue, to be followed by Uwe Rasch's essay on Huxley's 1912 sketchbook (with over 30 unpublished images) and a new selection of unpublished Huxley letters by James Sexton. The volume continues with several articles on Huxley in the 1920s and 1930s and is rounded off with an essay on Huxley's stance as social ecologistt.

Volume 15 (2015)

Aldous Huxley Annual. Volume 15 (2015)

Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure

Volume 12/13 of the Aldous Huxley Annual begins with a discussion of a lecture Huxley gave in Italian, an appraisal of his never-completed project of a novel on Catherine of Siena, and his recently re-discovered drawings for "Leda." Further critical articles on particular aspects of Huxley's work follow, together with the second Peter Edgerly Firchow Memorial Prize Essay by Hisashi Ozawa of King's College London. A painting by Carolyn Mary Kleefeld ushers in the second part of the book, which contains a selection of papers from the Oxford Symposium held in 2013. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol. 12/13) [Subject: Literary Criticism, Art]

Volume 12/13 (2012/2013)

Aldous Huxley Annual. Volume 12/13 (2012/2013)

" On the first Saturday in May every year in Louisville, Kentucky, shortly after 5:30 PM, a new horse attains racing immortality. The Kentucky Derby is like no other race, and its winners are the finest horses in the world. Covered in rich red roses, surrounded by flashing cameras and admiring crowds, these instant celebrities bear names like Citation, Secretariat, Spectacular Bid, and Seattle Slew. They're worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But in 1992, a funny thing happened on the way to the roses. The rattling roar of 130,000 voices tailed off into a high, hollow shriek as the horses crossed the finish line. Lil E. Tee? ABC broadcasters knew nothing about him, but they weren't alone. Who knew about Lil E. Tee? A blacksmith in Ocala, Florida, a veterinary surgeon in Ringoes, New Jersey, a trainer a Calder Race Course, and a few other people used to dealing with average horses knew this horse -- and realized what a long shot Lil E. Tee really was. On a Pennsylvania farm that raised mostly trotting horses, a colt with a dime-store pedigree was born in 1989. His odd gait and tendency to bellow for his mother earned him the nickname "E.T." Suffering from an immune deficiency and a bad case of colic, he survived surgery that usually ends a horse's racing career. Bloodstock agents dismissed him because of his mediocre breeding, and once he was sold for only $3,000. He'd live in five barns in seven states by the time he turned two. Somehow, this horse became one of the biggest underdogs to appear on the American sporting landscape. Lil E. Tee overcame his bleak beginnings to reach the respected hands of trainer Lynn Whiting, jockey Pat Day, and owner Cal Partee. After winning the Jim Beam stakes and finishing second in the Arkansas Derby, Lil E. Tee arrived at Churchill Downs to face a field of seventeen horses, including the highly acclaimed favorite, Arazi, a horse many people forecast to become the next Secretariat. A 17-to-1 longshot, Lil E. Tee won the Derby with a classic rally down the home stretch, and finally Pat Day had jockeyed a horse to Derby victory. John Eisenberg draws on more than fifteen years of sports writing experience and a hundred interviews throughout Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Florida, and Arkansas to tell the story almost nobody knew in 1992. Eisenberg is a sports columnist for the Baltimore Sun and has won more than twenty awards for his sports writing, including several Associated Press sports editors' first places."

Dickens's Great Expectations: Misnar's Pavilion versus Cinderella

Aldous Huxley Annual is the official organ of the Aldous Huxley Society at the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies in Munster, Germany. It publishes essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. It aspires to be the sort of periodical that Huxley would have wanted to read and to which he might have contributed. This issue is dedicated to Prof Peter Edgerly Firchow (18 October 2008) in appreciation of his merits as an outstanding Huxley scholar and as a Founding Member and Curator of the Aldous Huxley Society. It opens with Prof Firchow's keynote lecture at the Fourth International Aldous Huxley Symposium in Los Angeles in July 2008 and then presents a rich anthology of Huxley's uncollected prose from 1919 to 1963, edited by James Sexton. Two more lectures from the Los Angeles Symposium close this issue, one on death in Lawrence's and Huxley's fiction, and the other on Erwin Schrodinger's and Huxley's views on the final end of human life.

James Sexton

Aldous Huxley Annual is the official organ of the Aldous Huxley Society at the Center for Aldous Huxley Studies in Munster, Germany. The Society publishes essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. Volume 9 is the first to have a Guest Editor: Professor James Sexton. Sexton opens this issue with "A New Huxley Miscellany," which is followed by a selection of lectures from the Fourth International Aldous Huxley Symposium held in Los Angeles in July/August 2008. The issue closes with the first Peter Edgerly Firchow Memorial Prize Essay by Brian Smith of Suffolk University. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol. 9)

A Journal of Twentieth-century Thought and Beyond

Aldous Huxley Annual 2009

Volume 16 presents a miscellany of uncollected Huxley essays, edited by James Sexton, to be followed by a first selection of papers from the Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium held at Almeria in April 2017. This section opens with an essay that fills a blank spot on the map of Huxley criticism, James Sexton's study of Huxley and architecture. The volume continues with several articles (including one not from Almeria) on Brave New World and its wider context and closes with essays on Huxley's lifelong struggle with his deficient eyesight and on his view of the art of dying. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual, Vol. 16) [Subject: Literary Studies, Aldous Huxley, Literary Criticism]

Aldous Huxley Annual. Volume 16 (2016)

Aldous Huxley Annual is the official organ of the Aldous Huxley Society at the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies in Munster, Germany. It publishes essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. It aspires to be the sort of periodical that Huxley would have wanted to read and to which he might have contributed. This issue features Aldous Huxley's and Beth Wendel's dramatization of The Genius and the Goddess never before published. It also includes several rather unknown travel essays by Aldous Huxley as well as Peter E. Firchow's opening lecture at the Third International Aldous Huxley Symposium held in Riga in July 2004.

Aldous Huxley began as a poet. He perfected the voice of the modern satirical poet of ideas, who used art against itself to produce a parodic poetry of breakdowns, collapses, stalemates, and dead ends best suited to the apparent pointlessness of the post-war era. His cleverest, most irreverent poems are contrapuntal: they, in effect, silence venerable poets and cancel traditional formats. Huxley's poetic personas either fail to preserve conventional forms or purposely sabotage them. By 1920, Huxley became the parodic equivalent of the formative intelligences (i.e., Dante, Goethe, and Lucretius) who once synthesized their respective eras positively. In this book, author Jerome Meckier explicates most of Huxley's poems, including Leda, his masterpiece, an ironical modern myth. Meckier traces Huxley's development in terms of the poets he inserted in five of his eleven novels, along with their poems. These poets mostly fail as poets, their different stances falling apart one after another. But Huxley began to detect a spiritual significance underlying the creative urge. This allowed him to rehabilitate many of the Romantic and Victorian poets he formerly ridiculed as frauds and liars. Eventually, he celebrated mystical contemplation as silent poetry, positing a utopia in which everyone is a poet to the limits of his or her potentiality. Huxley became the perennial philosopher, a neo-Brahmin: the sage-like figure he initially personified parodically. His paradigmatic career took him from a Pyrrhonic silencing of outmoded poems and poets to the advocacy of a poetry of silence. (Series: "Human Potentialities". Studien zu Aldous Huxley & zeitgenossischer Kultur/Studies in Aldous Huxley & Contemporary Culture - Vol. 11)

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

This and the next Annual feature a collection of Aldous Huxley's early essays in art criticism, for the most part published anonymously. The present issue focuses on Huxley's critical approach to painting, particularly to Modernist works (Part I); The forthcoming Annual will concentrate on Huxley's appraisal of architecture, applied arts and sculpture in the 1920s (Part II). Bernfried Nugel is head of the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies at the English Seminar of the University of Muenster (Germany). Jerome Meckier is a researcher at the University of Kentucky and at the Centre for Aldous Huxley Studies at the English Seminar of the University of Muenster.

A Journal of Twentieth-Century Thought and Beyond

Aldous Huxley Annual is the official publication of the Aldous Huxley Society at the Center for Aldous Huxley Studies in MÃ¼nster, Germany. The Society publishes essays on the life, times, and interests of Aldous Huxley and his circle. It aspires to be the sort of periodical that Huxley would have wanted to read and to which he might have contributed. Aldous Huxley Annual celebrates its 10th anniversary with a special double numbered issue. The chief contributor on this momentous occasion is Aldous Huxley himself. Volume 10/11 contains a treasure trove of new Huxley items - such as letters, poems, stories, talks, proposals, introductions, and playlets - all arranged in chronological order. The contributions date from 1916 and run through 1963, the year of Huxley's death. Moreover, for the first time, Huxley is presented as an accomplished painter - the book's editors are proud to have procured reproductions of five Huxley paintings owned by his grandchildren Teresa and Mark Trevenen Huxley. The concluding section of the book consists of several articles on particular aspects of Huxley's work. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol. 10)

Jerome Meckier

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