G. K. Chesterton : a biography / Ian Ker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ker, I. T. (Ian Turnbull)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936.

Chesterton, G. K.

Authors, English--Biography.

Authors, English.

Genre:

Biographie.

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xx, 747 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.

Summary:

This full-length, life of G.K. Chesterton is the first comprehensive biography of both the man and the thinker and writer. It draws on -many unpublished letters and papers to evoke Chesterton's joyful humour, his humility and affinity to the common man, his love of the ordinary things of life.

Although Chesterton was a brilliant writer of nonsense and satirical verse, as well as the author of the Father Brown stories and the innovative novel, the Man who was Thursday, he is not counted among the major English novelists and poets. Nevertheless, as the successor of the great Victorian 'prophets' or 'sages', Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, and above all Newman, Ian Ker argues that Chesterton is a major English writer.

Chesterton's achievement as one of the great English literary critics has not hitherto been properly recognized, perhaps because his best literary criticism is of prose rather than poetry; Ker pays particular attention to Chesterton's writings on the. Victorians, especially Dickens. As a social and political thinker, Chesterton is contrasted here with, contemporary intellectuals like Bernard Shaw and H. G.Wells in his championing of democracy and the masses. Like John Henry Newman before him, Chesterton was pre-eminently a controversialist, whose. enormous output as a journalist is reflected in this biography. Finally, Chesterton is shown as a formidable apologist for Christianity and Catholicism, as well as a brilliant satirist of anti-Catholicism. Book jacket.

Contents:

The early days

Publishing and engagement

Marriage and fame

Controversy

Dickens

Orthodoxy

Shaw and Beaconsfield

Father Brown and the Marconi scandal

The Victorian compromise and illness

War and travel

America and conversion

The everlasting man

Distributism and apologetics

Rome and America again

The last years.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199601288

0199601283

OCLC:

671709689