Colin Wilson, Man Without a Shadow: the diary of an existentialist

Nicolas Tredell (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1963

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Colin Wilson’s fourth novel, which appeared as Man Without a Shadow: The Diary of an Existentialist (1963) in the UK and under the rather more lurid title of The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme in the USA, is a lively exploration of its narrator’s (and Wilson’s) ideas about the potential of the human mind to transform men into godlike creatures who will embody the next stage of human evolution and about sexuality as one means of glimpsing this potential. As its US (and, later, British) title suggests, its protagonist is the same as that in Wilson’s first novel, Ritual in the Dark (1960), and it takes the form of an intimate journal rather than that of the third-person narrative used in Ritual (…

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3265 words

Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Man Without a Shadow: the diary of an existentialist". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 May 2008 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23918, accessed 26 November 2024.]

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