imm103 1..4

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imm103 1..4

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: ojuhyfub
• Nombre de lectures: 61
• Langue: Français

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Literary Imagination Advance Access published September 20, 2007 1

Review of“Winston Churchill’s Imagination”by Paul Alkon

Paul K. Alkon,Winston Churchill’s Imagination. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006. 228 pagesþNotes, Works Cited, Index. ISBN 0838756328. In this concise account of Winston Churchill’s considerable literary achievement, Paul Alkon produces an absorbing portrait of the artist as cultural visionary. Churchill had published five books, including one novel, before winning his first election to Parliament in 1900. Before taking his seat he toured North America to lecture on his experiences in the Boer War and was introduced to his audience in New York City by Mark Twain, who autographed a complete edition of his works for the young visitor, offspring of an American mother and an English father, the ideal lineage as Twain wryly observed. England’s greatest political figure of the twentieth century began his public career as a writer of intriguing flexibility and range: a war correspondent, a novelist, a biographer, and a historian before, during, and after his decades of service as soldier, legislator, cabinet minister, and prime minister. The 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature that Churchill received (the year before Ernest Hemingway received his) scarcely does justice to the singular nature of Churchill’s remarkable legacy, but Alkon takes the Prize as a starting point to entice his own reader into a detailed review of the complex links between Churchill’s political and artistic concerns. The heart of Alkon’s discussion—occupying three of his five chapters—treats Churchill’s literary work during the 1930s, when he was largely out of power, on the periphery of a government whose inadequate response to the emerging threat of Fascist Germany Churchill deplored. Alkon gives careful and illuminating consideration to the ways in which Churchill adapted his eulogies of T. E. Lawrence, his largely unproduced film scenarios for Alexander Korda, and his multivolume biography of the Duke of Marlborough to awaken English readers to the scope of their current predicament. The Marlborough biography is an especially apt vehicle for Churchill’s multiple purposes. The intrinsic interest of the subject is clear enough, but Alkon sensitizes us at the same time to the range of Churchill’s personal concerns, in particular his desire to defend his great ancestor against the disparaging assessment of Macaulay and to dramatize his own intellectual and temperamental qualities before an English electorate that had grown increasingly disillusioned with its present leadership. “The major and omnipresent character inMarlboroughis its narrator,” as Alkon astutely and convincingly puts this point, while simultaneously persuading his own readers that Churchill’s gifts as a biographer and historian were far from merely selfserving.

Literary Imagination, pp. 1–4 doi:10.1093/litimag/imm103

The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: [e-mail]