The Outer and the Inner Life
A Wartime Work-in-Progress and its Offshoots
open access
- Adrian Stokes
-
edited by
- Paul Tucker - University of Florence - email
Abstract
Published here in its entirety for the first time, The Outer and the Inner Life was drafted at Little Park Owles, a house overlooking the sea between St Ives and Carbis Bay in Cornwall, immediately prior to and during the Second World War. Intended to instigate a new and definitive phase in Stokes’ writing, it collects reflections on and around a theme novel to his work, one of vast generality and in part the fruit of his recently acquired empirical knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis: the manifold interdependence of perceptual and inner experience and their conceptualizations. In this critical edition the manuscript is accompanied by a number of ‘offshoots’ or derivative texts and punctuated by detailed reconstructions of the circumstances and mutable ‘logic’ of its composition. Stokes’ tentative yet persistent exploration of his chosen theme led him unexpectedly to discover the continuity underlying and assimilating his current and his former preoccupations and to reconsider his long-standing concern with visual art. These aspects render The Outer and the Inner Life a text pivotal to Stokes’ output as a whole, poised as it is between his pre- and post-war writings and attesting as it abundantly does to their essential unity and coherence, despite the numerous transitions and transformations of his life and work.
Keywords Twentieth-century writing • Art criticism • Critical edition • Adrian Stokes • Visual art • Psychoanalysis • Perception • Inner experience
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/979-12-5742-052-9 | e-ISBN 979-12-5742-052-9 | ISBN (PRINT) 979-12-5742-053-6 | Published Oct. 21, 2026 | Language en
Copyright © 2026 Adrian Stokes. Paul Tucker. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.