Max Beerbohm

Zuleika Dobson (eBook, ePUB)

Or, An Oxford Love Story

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm was, like his friend Oscar Wilde, such an acclaimed wit (and essayist, caricaturist, and parodist) that George Bernard Shaw dubbed him "the incomparable Max." But Beerbohm's comic masterpiece Zuleika Dobson-one of the Modern Library's top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century-is the only novel he ever wrote. Strangely out of print in the United States for years, this crackling farce is nonetheless as piercing and fresh as when it first appeared in 1911: a hilarious dismantling of academia and privilege, and a swashbuckling lampooning of class systems and notions of masculine virtue. The all-male campus of Oxford-Beerbohm's alma mater-is a place where aesthetics holds sway above all else, and where witty intellectuals reign. Things haven't changed for its privileged student body for years . . . until the beguiling music-hall prestidigitator Zuleika Dobson shows up. The book's marvelous prose dances along the line between reality and the absurd as students and dons alike fall at Zuleika's feet, and she cuts a wide swath across the campus-until she encounters one young aristocrat for whom she is astonished to find she has feelings. As Zuleika, and her creator, zero in on their targets, the book takes some surprising and dark twists on its way to a truly startling ending-an ending so striking that readers will understand why Virginia Woolf said that "Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect."

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Melville House
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Januar 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781612192932
• Artikelnr.: 40184733

Autorenporträt

Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm (1872-1956) was the youngest of nine children born in London to well-to-do Lithuanian immigrants. As a boy he showed no propensity for writing or artwork, but despite the lack of formal training, upon entering Merton College, Oxford, he quickly became known for his essays and caricatures (and for being a dandy). When The Strand Magazine published thirty-six of his drawings in 1892, his career took off, and he left school without a degree. (Oxford would later give him an honorary degree.) He went to America briefly, to write press releases for his brother's theatrical company, then returned to England and wrote essays and drew caricatures for his friend Aubrey Beardsley's The Yellow Book magazine, among other publications. Some of his work around this time concerned the trial of Oscar Wilde, whom he'd befriended while a student. The trial, particularly Wilde's defense of "the love that dare not speak its name," moved him greatly. In 1896, he published his first book, a collection of his essays called The Works of Max Beerbohm, and the first of many collections of his caricatures, Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen. Two years later he succeeded George Bernard Shaw as drama critic for the Saturday Review, a position he retained until 1910, when he married American actress Florence Kahn (Evelyn Waugh speculated it was a mariage blanc), and moved to a house overlooking the Mediterranean in Rapallo, Italy. Despite Florence's death, in 1951, and despite becoming popular in England as a BBC commentator, Beerbohm would remain in Italy until his own death, decades later at age eighty-three, just after marrying his former secretary and companion, Elisabeth Jungmann. Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St. Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics and Jane Eyre: A Reader's Guide 
to Criticism.