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Following in the tradition of Don Quixote, Earl Lavender is the story of two impecunious gentlemen who run away from their conventional lives, style themselves 'Earl Lavender' and 'Lord Brumm', and set out to preach the new creed of Evolution. Their hilarious romp across London leads them to all sorts of strange adventures, such as a wild hansom cab chase, a sojourn among a subterranean society of flagellants, and the discovery of the evolutionary 'Missing Link'. A key Decadent text, Earl Lavender (1895) is also Davidson's response to what he saw as some of the more ridiculous ideas and behaviours of the age. This new edition features a new introduction by Mark Valentine and a reproduction of the original frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley. John Davidson (1857-1909) was a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist. Although during his lifetime he was compared favourably with Hardy, Housman, and Yeats, and admired by Shaw and T. S. Eliot, Davidson's reputation has languished since his tragic suicide. Long out of print, Earl Lavender is now restored to modern audiences, who will find that Davidson's humour and satire are as fresh today as in 1895.
As long ago as 1917, Virginia Woolf expressed surprise that anyone as good as John Davidson should 'be so little famous'. Now, at last, criticism has established Davidson as a key figure in the emergence of literary modernism, as the best Scottish poet between Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid, and as an important influence on the younger poets of his day, most notably T. S. Eliot. In this, the first biography of Davidson for more than thirty years, John Sloan presents a wealth of new information about Davidson's life, including his time in London, and the ties which connect him to Sherard's circle, to Wilde, Yeats, and the Rhymers' Club. John Davidson, First of the Moderns explores Davidson's career in London as a penniless author, struggling to reconcile the freedom to experience demanded by the avant-garde artist in the age of the Decadence with the obligations of family, and to combine his ambition for a many-sided reputation as a poet, novelist, and playwright with his need to survive in the commercial rough and tumble of Fleet Street, the theatre, and Paternoster Row. The conditions of authorship, the literary scandals and rows of Fleet Street, and the revelations of the characters involved here provide the literary background to the life of John Davidson. The picture that emerges is not simply of a late Victorian rebel, but of a proto-Modernist who from his recovery from a breakdown in 1896 to his strange disappearance and death in 1909, pioneered a new idiom and subject matter for twentieth-century verse.
Conceiving the City is an innovative study of the ways in which a generation of late-Victorian novelists, poets, painters, and theoreticians attempted to represent London in literature and art. Breaking away from the language and style of Dickens and the static panorama paintings of William Powell Frith, major figures such as Henry James and J. M. Whistler, and, crucially, less-celebrated authors such as Arthur Machen, Edwin Pugh, and George Egerton bent realism into exciting new shapes. In the naturalism of George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, the fragmentary impressions of Ford Madox Ford, and the brooding mystery of Alvin Langdon Coburn's photogravures, London emerged as a focus for dynamic, explicitly modern art. Although many of these insights would be dismissed or at least downplayed by subsequent generations, the ideas evolved during the period from 1870 to 1914 anticipate not only the work of high modernists such as Eliot and Woolf, but also that of later urban theorists such as Foucault and de Certeau, and the novels and travelogues of contemporary London writers Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Nicholas Freeman recovers a sense of late-Victorian London as a subject for dynamic theoretical and aesthetic experiments, and shows, in stimulating analyses of Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Arthur Symons, and others how much of our understanding of urban space we owe to eminent (and not so eminent) Victorian figures. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book restores a much-needed historical perspective to our engagement with the metropolis.