Essays on Politics and Literature Bernard Crick

The Romantic period was one of the most creative, intense and turbulent periods of English literature, an age marked by revolution, reaction, and reform in politics, and by the invention of imaginative literature in its distinctively modern form. This History presents an engaging account of six decades of literary production around the turn of the nineteenth century. Reflecting the most up-to-date research, the essays are designed both to provide a narrative of Romantic literature, and to offer new and stimulating readings of the key texts. One group of essays addresses the various locations of literary activity - both in England and, as writers developed their interests in travel and foreign cultures, across the world. A second set of essays traces how texts responded to great historical and social change. With a comprehensive bibliography, timeline and index, this volume will be an important resource for research and teaching in the field. ...

Essays by the renowned psychiatrist on that most central unit: the family. Notes, bibliography, index. ...

The Gothic mode, typically preoccupied by questions of difference and otherness, consistently imagines the Other as a source of grotesque horror. The sixteen critical essays in this collection examine the ways in which those suffering from mental and physical ailments are refigured as Other, and how they are imagined to be monstrous. Together, the essays highlight the Gothic inclination to represent all ailments as visibly monstrous, even those, such as mental illness, which were invisible. Paradoxically, the Other also becomes a pitiful figure, often evoking empathy. This exploration of illness and disability represents a strong addition to Gothic studies. ...

As a central icon of political and cultural democracy, the crowd occupies a prominent place in the American literary and cultural landscape. Mary Esteve examines a range of writing by Poe, Hawthorne, Du Bois, James, and Stephen Crane to provide a study of crowd representations in American literature from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century. She argues that these writers examined the aesthetic and political meanings of urban crowd scenes. ...

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature contains 23 newly commissioned essays by major philosophers and literary scholars that investigate literature as a form of attention to human life. Various forms of attention are considered under the headings of Genres (from Ancient Epic to the Novel and Contemporary Experimental Writing), Periods (from Realism and Romanticism to Postcolonialism), Devices and Powers (Imagination, Plot, Character, Style, and Emotion), and Contexts and Uses (in relation to inquiry, morality, and politics). In each case, the effort is to track and evaluate how specific modes and works of imaginative literature answer to important needs of human subjects for orientation, the articulation of interest in life, and the working through of emotion, within situations that are both sociohistorical and human. Hence these essays show how and why literature matters in manifold ways in and for human cultural life, and they show how philosophers and imaginative literary writers have continually both engaged with and criticized each other.

0195146999In Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, Viet Nguyen argues that Asian American intellectuals have idealized Asian America, ignoring its saturation with capitalist practices. This idealization of Asian America means that Asian American intellectuals can neither grapple with their culture's ideological diversity nor recognize their own involvement with capitalist practices such as the selling of racial identity. Making his case through the example of literature, which remains a critical arena of cultural production for Asian Americans, Nguyen demonstrates that literature embodies the complexities, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture. ...

0195146999In Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, Viet Nguyen argues that Asian American intellectuals have idealized Asian America, ignoring its saturation with capitalist practices. This idealization of Asian America means that Asian American intellectuals can neither grapple with their culture's ideological diversity nor recognize their own involvement with capitalist practices such as the selling of racial identity. Making his case through the example of literature, which remains a critical arena of cultural production for Asian Americans, Nguyen demonstrates that literature embodies the complexities, conflicts, and potential future options of Asian American culture. ...

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Figuring Animals is a collection of fifteen essays concerning the representation of animals in literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and cultural practice. At the turn of the new century, it is helpful to reconsider our inherited understandings of the species, some of which are still useful to us. It is also important to look ahead to new understandings and new dialogue, which may contribute to the survival of us all. The contributors to this volume participate in this dialogue in a variety of ways--through personal experience, natural history, cultural studies, philosophical inquiry, art history, literary analysis, film studies, and theoretical imagining, and through a combination of these trains of thought. The essays expose weaknesses in western epistemological frames of reference that for centuries have limited our views and, thus, our experiences of animal being, including our own....

The Gothic mode, typically preoccupied by questions of difference and otherness, consistently imagines the Other as a source of grotesque horror. The sixteen critical essays in this collection examine the ways in which those suffering from mental and physical ailments are refigured as Other, and how they are imagined to be monstrous. Together, the essays highlight the Gothic inclination to represent all ailments as visibly monstrous, even those, such as mental illness, which were invisible. Paradoxically, the Other also becomes a pitiful figure, often evoking empathy. This exploration of illness and disability represents a strong addition to Gothic studies.

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Thomas Paine has been celebrated for his role in persuading the American colonists to revolt against Britain and declare their independence. At the same time, however, scholars have generally dismissed his writings as propaganda. This book demonstrates that Paine was a skilled and sophisticated writer and thinker who transformed political literature in the late eighteenth century by creating a new literature of politics that bridged political philosophy and the everyday, common-sensical knowledge of ordinary people. The impact of this new political language would be remarkable as it energized a mass public to participate in the arena of politics, an arena from which they had been excluded. ...

I must confess, I've only read three of the essays so far in this book, but it's the introduction that I'm most grateful for. Daniel W. Smith does a magnificent job of explicating many of the concepts that have perplexed and confounded my poor artistic mind. I feel that Deleuze had a special understanding of literature, and I was interested to see what he has to say about some of the writers I also love