Father And Son: A Study Of Two Temperaments
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: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
At the heart of Victorian England's collision between science and faith stands one of the most extraordinary memoirs ever written — Edmund Gosse's Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, a searing autobiographical chronicle of a childhood shaped by devotion, intellectual awakening, and the slow, painful rupture between a father and his only son. Gosse presents the suffocating world of his upbringing under Philip Henry Gosse, a distinguished marine biologist and devout Plymouth Brethren member who struggled irreconcilably with Darwin's theory of evolution, and illuminates how a child raised in rigid religious orthodoxy gradually discovers the irresistible pull of literature, beauty, and independent thought. The memoir unfolds with exquisite precision and restrained emotional intensity, charting the boy's journey from pious submission to quiet, courageous self-determination. Published in 1907 and edited here with an introduction by James Hepburn, this Oxford University Press edition restores the work to its proper place in the canon of English autobiography. Gosse's prose is at once elegiac and forensic — tender toward the memory of his father yet unflinching in its honesty about the psychological cost of a faith imposed rather than chosen. Celebrated by critics as a landmark of Edwardian literature, Father and Son transcends its biographical origins to become a meditation on the universally human struggle between inherited belief and the forging of a sovereign self — a question that, a century on, remains as urgent and unresolved as ever.
Author: Edmund Gosse
Format: Hardback
Published: 1974, Oxford University Press
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
At the heart of Victorian England's collision between science and faith stands one of the most extraordinary memoirs ever written — Edmund Gosse's Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, a searing autobiographical chronicle of a childhood shaped by devotion, intellectual awakening, and the slow, painful rupture between a father and his only son. Gosse presents the suffocating world of his upbringing under Philip Henry Gosse, a distinguished marine biologist and devout Plymouth Brethren member who struggled irreconcilably with Darwin's theory of evolution, and illuminates how a child raised in rigid religious orthodoxy gradually discovers the irresistible pull of literature, beauty, and independent thought. The memoir unfolds with exquisite precision and restrained emotional intensity, charting the boy's journey from pious submission to quiet, courageous self-determination. Published in 1907 and edited here with an introduction by James Hepburn, this Oxford University Press edition restores the work to its proper place in the canon of English autobiography. Gosse's prose is at once elegiac and forensic — tender toward the memory of his father yet unflinching in its honesty about the psychological cost of a faith imposed rather than chosen. Celebrated by critics as a landmark of Edwardian literature, Father and Son transcends its biographical origins to become a meditation on the universally human struggle between inherited belief and the forging of a sovereign self — a question that, a century on, remains as urgent and unresolved as ever.