Of Making Many Books

"Of Making Many Books" is the last volume of a trilogy which includes "Towards a Christian Poetics" and "Poetry and Possibility". In these works Michael Edwards has been slowly elaborating a counter-culture to the current reductive and deluded materialism, where varieties of Marxism, Post-Structuralism and old-style Empiricism all lie unhappily together. He has explored afresh the movement of history, the nature of self, the place of the human in a non-human world open at all points to the divine. The view he presents is explicitly Christian, but it also contains a critique of the customary metaphysics of Christianity, and a contemporary reading of the Biblical analysis of the human condition. The main focus of this latest volume is still on literature, and particularly on poetry and poets, from Shakespeare to the present. Through this central engagement with writing, Edwards seeks to enter some of our most urgent concerns, and aims for a new understanding of dream memory and imagination, of origin and end, of self and other, and of a language saved from Saussure. His study of the distresses and the joys involved in the making of books also leads to a continuation of his new reading of T.S.Eliot, begun in "Eliot/Language", and to the presentation of St John's Gospel as the perfect act of writing and the most fundamental of all books.