Colin Wilson originally began to write his play
The Metal Flower Blossom(published 2008 in
The Death of God and Other Plays) in 1953, for a group of young Soho friends and acquaintances with whom he had worked on presenting a public reading in July of that year of his
Twentieth Century Review(unpublished and now apparently lost). The group broke up and he did not complete the play then, but finished it for a one-off production in 1960 and then drew on it for his second novel,
Adrift in Soho(1961). The title of the play comes from that of an anonymous Chinese novel, written in the 16th century during the late Ming Dynasty and notorious for its sexual frankness, called
Jin Ping Mei, which, according to Wilson, means “metal-vase flower blossom” (12), although it has been translated by…
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "The Metal Flower Blossom". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 December 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35580, accessed 23 April 2024.]
