E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room

Hazel McNair Hutchison (University of Leeds)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1922

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Autobiography (literary)
Novel

Resources

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The Enormous Room

was written in the fall of 1920 and published by Boni and Liveright in New York in 1922. It is the firsthand account of Cummings’ incarceration in a French military detention centre during World War I. Loosely modelled around John Bunyan’s allegorical narrative

The Pilgrim’s Progress

, Cummings’ text presents the story of his arrest, imprisonment and release as a journey towards perception. Through a mixture of reportage, poetic prose, interjections in French and line drawings, Cummings creates a series of studies of his captors and fellow inmates, revealing his contempt for cruelty and authority, and his irrepressible delight in the variety of human nature.

When America formally entered WWI in 1917, Cummings signed up as a volunteer ambulance driver with the

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2016 words

Citation: Hutchison, Hazel McNair. "The Enormous Room". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 March 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=955, accessed 24 November 2024.]

E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room

Dates

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