GEORGE MEREDITH AS A POET AND DRAMATIC NOVELIST

This is Herbert Marshall McLuhan's MSc Thesis written in 1938 while studying at the Department of English of the University of Manitoba. There is much to say about this work except that it remained unpublished for too long. Encounter the young McLuhan of the 40’s and 50’s here in his early beginnings. The men who’s key interest was in the artists methods and explorations of Poe, Pound, Eliot, Lewis - the men of 1914 - and above all Joyce remains largely unknown to people outside Canada. After his MA on “George Meredith - Poet and Dramatic Novelist”(1934) he entered the academic stage with his first article on “G.K Chesterton - A Practical Mystic” published in 1936. Followed in 1943 with his dissertation on “Thomas Nash In The Learning Of His Time” - a 16th century novelist he published already more then one hundred articles almost exclusively on poets and artists elaborating on their techniques and styles before proceeding his own programme exemplified in his later works. His literary criticism and media studies have not yet exemplified themselves fully before "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962) and "Understanding The Extensions of Men" (1964) - the only two of four books he wrote alone. In this period his conversion to Catholicism and the launch of the first satellite (Sputnik) run deeply throughout his entire work. This is not the later pop icon - McLuhan - who is remembered for enigmatic phrases such as “The Medium is the Message”, “Media are Extensions of Men” or the “Global Village”. Borrowing from artists he studied intensely what you will encounter in his MSc Thesis is the young McLuhan, the introspective one. Largely devoid of the aphoristic style which characterises his best known works, it is a key work to understand McLuhan’s strategy as an explorer as well as a entertaining side note of what will be become his “New” Science Nuova; The Laws of Media (1988).