Father And Son
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
One of the most candid and psychologically acute memoirs in the English language, Father and Son chronicles the extraordinary collision between two irreconcilable worlds — the rigid, fundamentalist faith of a Victorian naturalist father and the awakening literary imagination of his son. Edmund Gosse reconstructs his Devonshire childhood with unflinching honesty, portraying his father Philip Henry Gosse, a celebrated zoologist and Plymouth Brethren devotee, as a man of towering conviction whose religious certainty slowly becomes a prison from which young Edmund must escape. Published in 1907 and subtitled A Study of Two Temperaments, the narrative maps the painful, incremental process by which a sensitive child dismantles the doctrines imposed upon him and claims his own intellectual identity. Gosse writes with a rare combination of tenderness and surgical precision, never quite condemning the father he clearly loved, yet refusing to romanticise the suffocating piety that shaped his earliest years. The memoir stands as a landmark of autobiographical literature, anticipating the confessional mode of the twentieth century and sitting comfortably alongside works by John Stuart Mill and Thomas De Quincey as a testament to the Victorian crisis of faith. Rich in period detail and luminous in its prose, it poses a question that still resonates: at what cost does a child become himself?
Author: Edmund Gosse
Format: Paperback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
One of the most candid and psychologically acute memoirs in the English language, Father and Son chronicles the extraordinary collision between two irreconcilable worlds — the rigid, fundamentalist faith of a Victorian naturalist father and the awakening literary imagination of his son. Edmund Gosse reconstructs his Devonshire childhood with unflinching honesty, portraying his father Philip Henry Gosse, a celebrated zoologist and Plymouth Brethren devotee, as a man of towering conviction whose religious certainty slowly becomes a prison from which young Edmund must escape. Published in 1907 and subtitled A Study of Two Temperaments, the narrative maps the painful, incremental process by which a sensitive child dismantles the doctrines imposed upon him and claims his own intellectual identity. Gosse writes with a rare combination of tenderness and surgical precision, never quite condemning the father he clearly loved, yet refusing to romanticise the suffocating piety that shaped his earliest years. The memoir stands as a landmark of autobiographical literature, anticipating the confessional mode of the twentieth century and sitting comfortably alongside works by John Stuart Mill and Thomas De Quincey as a testament to the Victorian crisis of faith. Rich in period detail and luminous in its prose, it poses a question that still resonates: at what cost does a child become himself?