The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy
by Hugh Kenner
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Wide-ranging enough to encompass Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, Jonathan Swift's hyper-civilized horses, and Alan Turing-a mathematician with a penchant for riding a bicycle while wearing a gas mask-The Counterfeiters is one of Hugh Kenner's greatest achievements. In this fascinating work of literary and cultural criticism, Kenner seeks the roots and results of mankind's quest to both reproduce and improve upon the natural world (a Victorian clockwork duck that can eat and quack), and even show more himself (a computer that can solve equations faster than we can). The intermingling of art and science, of man and machine, of machine and art, is the heart of this book. With his characteristically accessible style and wit, Kenner brings together history, literature, science, and art to find the personal in what is an increasingly counterfeit world. Book jacket. show lessTags
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79+ Works 2,696 Members
Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) was one of America's great literary critics. He wrote on a range of subjects, including Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and geodesic domes. The following books by Hugh Kenner are available from Dalkey Archive Press: The Counterfeiters, Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians and Joyce's show more Voices. show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy
- Original publication date
- 1968
- Epigraph
- Wherever this is objective truth there is satire -Wyndham Lewis
- Dedication
- for Mary Anne
nutrix formarum mentis - Quotations
- They call themselves Houyhnhnms. They look like horses and they talk like Bertrand Russell. (Pp.1-2)
Imagination, grown specialized, is not fed on visions but is curious about applications. (157)
Spontaneity is both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to imitate, and art's vocation is always to do the hard way what is being done easily. (170) - Blurbers
- Sale, Roger; Donoghue, Denis; Kinsley, William; Croce, Arlene
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Statistics
- Members
- 138
- Popularity
- 235,910
- Rating
- (4.61)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 2
