Collected Works of Kenneth White – serie

These three books reflect the beginnings of one of the most radical and exhilarating figures in modern literatureIncandescent Limbo recounts White's years in Paris. Many a writer in the modern era had made Paris a focal point of his or her activity, but probably no one made more of it or got more out of it than Kenneth White. While exploring a labyrinthine underworld, the book is fundamentally an autoanalysis and traces the birth of the writer as an intellectual nomad.Letters from Gourgounel takes us from the city to a wild part of south-eastern France, the Ard che, where White undertakes a resourcing in an elementary context. Hailed in England as a 'fascinating curiosity of literature', this book not only made White famous overnight in France, it was seen there as a turning point in the contemporary situation.In the third book, Travels in the Drifting Dawn, the intellectual nomad begins his moves across territories and cultures. After passing through the London underground of the sixties, then delving into the ground of his native Scotland and neighbouring Ireland, we shift back to the Continent, accumulating experience on different levels in France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, before concluding the cycle in North Africa. The trilogy is not only a summary of White's itinerary in its initial stages, it opens up a whole intellectual and cultural programme.

Three collections of essays whose aim is to express the cartography and the experience of a live, open worldThese essays all explore Scottish subjects and the wider issues of geopetics. This volume starts with On Scottish Ground by delving into forgotten cultural resources. Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath explores more socio-political considerations before opening out to a larger space of cosmological meditation in The Wanderer and his Charts.

Kenneth White achieved fame in his adopted country of France as a poet, essayist and travel writer. His status was confirmed in 1983 by his appointment as Professor of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne in Paris, from which position, in 1989, he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics which helped establish 'geopoetics', that White had first proposed in the 1970s, as a distinct and recognised discipline in the humanities. Between Two Worlds is White's account of how a working-class Scot from Ayrshire became a prominent figure in French cultural and intellectual life, despite having been sacked by the university where he was teaching for his part in the student revolt of 1968. It explains the intellectual energies that went into the creation of 'geopoetics' and the style and purpose of his distinctive mode of travel-writing. It is also the story of how he and his wife Marie-Claude set about bringing back to life abandoned properties in the Ardeche and in Brittan.

Kenneth White (1936 2023) established his reputation as a poet, essayist and travel writer in France in the 1970s and 80s, having left Britain in 1970. He became Professor of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne in 1983 and founded the International Institute of Geopoetics in Paris in 1989. The three books in this volume are what he came to describe as 'waybooks', accounts of travels designed to confront the reader with the condition of the modern world and, through their invocation of the notion of geopoetics, to reveal what might lie beyond its familiar limit.

These three books reflect the beginnings of one of the most radical and exhilarating figures in modern literatureIncandescent Limbo recounts White's years in Paris. Many a writer in the modern era had made Paris a focal point of his or her activity, but probably no one made more of it or got more out of it than Kenneth White. While exploring a labyrinthine underworld, the book is fundamentally an autoanalysis and traces the birth of the writer as an intellectual nomad.Letters from Gourgounel takes us from the city to a wild part of south-eastern France, the Ardèche, where White undertakes a resourcing in an elementary context. Hailed in England as a 'fascinating curiosity of literature', this book not only made White famous overnight in France, it was seen there as a turning point in the contemporary situation.In the third book, Travels in the Drifting Dawn, the intellectual nomad begins his moves across territories and cultures. After passing through the London underground of the sixties, then delving into the ground of his native Scotland and neighbouring Ireland, we shift back to the Continent, accumulating experience on different levels in France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, before concluding the cycle in North Africa. The trilogy is not only a summary of White's itinerary in its initial stages, it opens up a whole intellectual and cultural programme.