David Jones's The Grail Mass and Other Works: (Modernist Archives)

About the Book

Drawing on new archival discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David Jones’s The Grail Mass, the unfinished and unpublished project from which came both his masterpiece The Anathemata – a work described by W.H. Auden as ‘one of the most important poems of our times’ – and The Sleeping Lord and other fragments, his final collection. With detailed commentary on the development and reconstruction of the text, this edition provides a full picture of Jones’s literary endeavours over the second half of his life and further establishes his status as a major figure in the first wave of British modernist writers alongside T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.

In addition to the text of The Grail Mass, this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Part One: The Grail Mass
A.) On Reading The Grail Mass: a commentary on the text’s development, fragmentation, and reconstruction
B.) Text of The Grail Mass

Part Two: A True Fragment, An Extraction, and A Variant
A.) The Roman Dinner Conversation (Section XIV)
A.1) A Commentary on The Roman Dinner Conversation
A.2) Text of The Roman Dinner Conversation
B.) Extraction from Keel Ram Stauros
B.1) A Commentary on The Extraction from Keel Ram Stauros
B.2) Text of The Extraction from Keel Ram Stauros
C.) The BBC Variant of The Hunt
C.1) A Commentary on the BBC variant of The Hunt
C.2) Text of the BBC variant of The Hunt

Part Three: Origins and Endings:
A.) The Book of Balaam’s Ass
A.1) A Commentary on The Book of Balaam’s Ass
A.2) Text of The Book of Balaam’s Ass
B.) The Absolom Mass
B.1) A Commentary on The Absolom Mass
B.2) Text of The Absolom Mass
C.) The Kensington Mass
C.1) A Commentary on The Kensington Mass
C.2) Text of The Kensington Mass
D.) Under Arcturus
D.1) A Commentary on Under Arcturus
D.2) Text of Under Arcturus

Notes

Afterword: The Grail Mass, The Anathemata, and The Sleeping Lord

Appendix A: The Editing of The Grail Mass

Bibliography
Index

About the Author :

The poet and painter David Jones (1895-1974) was one of the most important and original voices in British modernism. His epic poem In Parenthesis was described by T.S. Eliot as ‘a work of genius’ and by Stephen Spender as ‘the most monumental work of poetic genius to come out of World War I’ and his many admirers included W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden and Herbert Read.

Thomas Goldpaugh is Professor Emeritus of English at Marist College, USA.

Jamie Callison is Associate Professor of British and American Literature at Nord University, Norway.

Review :
An indispensable addition to the Jones corpus. It is also a deeply impressive textual achievement, and a brilliantly realized and instructive engagement with a rich and complex literary archive … The fullness of Jones’s vision on the page is honoured, and poetic practices which might seem esoteric are validated and released for the reader’s appreciation ... [Goldpaugh and Callison's] curiosity and authority as editors shines through with the same force whether they are describing Jones’s use of pencil, ink or biro, or revisiting the ambiguous and provocative issue of his political attitudes. The editors' [work is] devoted, skilled, and erudite ... The reconstruction of The Grail Mass does read as a coherent and convincing text, from Mass opening to the close of the soldiers’ watch on the wall. This is a tribute to the literary, as well as the editorial craft of Goldpaugh and Callison ... Another joy of this book is the opportunity to read and compare four versions of the ‘Mass opening’ (one in The Grail Mass, three in the ‘Other Works’). This volume will appeal to a variety of audiences: modernists, theologists, and Welsh literary scholars ... It is a substantial, alternative volume to The Roman Quarry, advancing our understanding of Jones’s work in significant ways.