Immediately after World War I, four major European and American poets and thinkers--W. B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, R. M. Rilke, and C. G. Jung--moved into towers as their principal habitations. Taking this striking coincidence as its starting point, this book sets out to locate modern turriphilia in its cultural context and to explore the biographical circumstances that motivated the four writers to choose their unusual retreats. From the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia to the ivory towers of the fin de si cle, the author traces the emergence of a variety of symbolic associations with the proud towers of the past, ranging from spirituality and intellect to sexuality and sequestration.But in every case the tower served both literally and symbolically as a refuge from the urban modernism with whose values the four writers found themselves at odds. While the classic modernists (Eliot, Woolf, Hart Crane) often singled out the broken tower as the image of a crumbling past, these writers actualized their powerful visions: Yeats and Rilke moved into medieval towers in Ireland and Switzerland, while Jeffers and Jung built themselves towers at Carmel and Bollingen as secluded spaces in which to cultivate the traditions and values they cherished. The last chapter traces this perseverance of the ancient image through its heyday in the twenties and into the present, where it has undergone renewal, institutionalization, and parody.Originally published in 1998.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: Most of Norman Mailer’s works depict the reality of the United States of America and the complexities of the contemporary American social, political and economic scenes. They also contributed to the development of literary tourism...read more

Product Description: This innovative new book examines the ways in which writers’ houses contribute to the making of memory. It shows that houses built or inhabited by poets and novelists both reflect and construct the author’s private and artistic persona; it also demonstrates how this materialized process of self-fashioning is subsequently appropriated within various strategies and policies of cultural memory...read more

Product Description: This book offers both an introduction to the vibrant field of literary tourism studies and a selection of cutting-edge cross-disciplinary research. Indispensable for students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture, it provides fascinating insights into the reception of, amongst others, Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron and Wordsworth...read more

Product Description: The Sense of an Interior is a fascinating exploration of domestic space and of the ways it determines how writers work. The book looks at four famous figures - Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Marcel Proust, and examines the relationship between their work and the spaces where they wrote...read more

Product Description: Place - setting, location - is as central to the study of literature as character. This three-volume set is a title-driven reference work that analyzes the use of place in literary works. The cyclopaedia contains articles on more than 1300 literary works - representing over 630 authors...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 2001... What better year for a foreword written by Sir Arthur C. Clarke? The venerable master of science fiction and long-time resident of Sri Lanka kicks off a second exotic feast of literary adventure that transports both the reader (vicariously) and the traveler (via practical guide) around the world...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: From Venice to Vietnam, from the Welsh coast to Cairo, Don Meredith has travelled in the wake of 20th-century writers, using their novels and poems as guides, as another wayfarer might turn to Fodor's or the Guide Bleu. Canvassing the works of authors especially attuned to a sense of place, the author has gone in search of the backstreets, basilicas, cafes, piazzas and countrysides that figured so powerfully in their writings...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: The houses of writers are often places of both creation and inspiration, studio as much as home. This wonderful book takes readers into the intimacy of the homes of 20 great international figures--from Hemingway's simple, tropical world on Key West to the Connecticut Yankee home of Mark Twain to William Faulkner's Oxford plantation--to reveal their private worlds...read more