Critical Essay | Critical Essay by George Woodcock

Critical Essay by George Woodcock

SOURCE: "Norman Douglas: the Willing Exile," in Ariel, Vol. 13, No. 4, October, 1982, pp. 87-101.

Woodcock was a highly respected and influential Canadian literary critic. In the following essay, he discusses the theme of exile in Douglas's works and in his life-

To talk of exile writers is to cover an extraordinary range of experience, for even when one has excluded those who have observed poignantly on their wanderings but have returned to their spiritual and physical homes to record those observations, like André Gide and Graham Greene and the classic nineteenth-century scientific wanderers, there remains the fundamental division between those one can call outcasts and those one can call expatriates.

The division seemed especially apparent to me when, in studying Norman Douglas' writings, I read what at first seemed to me a surprising passage in which he approved of Ouida's referring to Oscar Wilde as a cabotin (roughly,...
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