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Author: Stephen Spender Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520312309 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Shelley said, in his Defence of Poetry, that poetry should be both centre and circumference of knowledge. In his new book, Spender takes Shelley's claim and relates it to modern literature. He points out that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, writers have been conscious of there being a problem of creating literature in the industrial era. All the discussions of tradition, symbolism, myth and the rest are part of a conscious strategy of writers to come to terms with a modern world which they feel presents quite special problems for them. Spender shows how Matthew Arnold's idea that criticism might be more important than poetry in our time, was taken over by poets who wrote criticism, and how in tern they have become superseded by critics who write poetry. The critical intelligence tens to absorb creative energy. He discusses the difference between the creative and critical functions and things that the present tendency of criticism to supersede creativity, and for poetry to become an academic exercise conducted by poets who are dons, is having a stifling effect on poetry. He thinks that there is an increasing tendency for the most creative activity of literature to become shut off from life and fermented, and that literature should be related much more to contemporary history, and less to dogmatic principles of academic criticism. This is a book in which the writer tried to reassert the relationship of literature to modern life. He believes that this relationship was the pre-occupation of writers in the 1920s and 1930, but that since then literature has become increasingly split into the writing of the new academics and that of aggressive anti-intellectuals. He things that contemporary criticism should be on a much wider basis, and take into account the history and the society in which we live, as well as the abstract principles which recent critics have evolved. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.
Author: Stephen Spender Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520312309 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Shelley said, in his Defence of Poetry, that poetry should be both centre and circumference of knowledge. In his new book, Spender takes Shelley's claim and relates it to modern literature. He points out that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, writers have been conscious of there being a problem of creating literature in the industrial era. All the discussions of tradition, symbolism, myth and the rest are part of a conscious strategy of writers to come to terms with a modern world which they feel presents quite special problems for them. Spender shows how Matthew Arnold's idea that criticism might be more important than poetry in our time, was taken over by poets who wrote criticism, and how in tern they have become superseded by critics who write poetry. The critical intelligence tens to absorb creative energy. He discusses the difference between the creative and critical functions and things that the present tendency of criticism to supersede creativity, and for poetry to become an academic exercise conducted by poets who are dons, is having a stifling effect on poetry. He thinks that there is an increasing tendency for the most creative activity of literature to become shut off from life and fermented, and that literature should be related much more to contemporary history, and less to dogmatic principles of academic criticism. This is a book in which the writer tried to reassert the relationship of literature to modern life. He believes that this relationship was the pre-occupation of writers in the 1920s and 1930, but that since then literature has become increasingly split into the writing of the new academics and that of aggressive anti-intellectuals. He things that contemporary criticism should be on a much wider basis, and take into account the history and the society in which we live, as well as the abstract principles which recent critics have evolved. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.
Author: Daniel H. Nexon Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 140083080X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule. Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony. Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.
Author: Loyd Grossman Publisher: ISBN: 9781858946412 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
At the time of his death in 1820, Benjamin West was the most famous artist in the English-speaking world, and much admired throughout Europe. From humble beginnings in Pennsylvania, he had become the first American artist to study in Italy, and within a few short years of his arrival in London, was instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts (he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds to become its second President) and became history painter to King George III. In his lifetime, West's meteoric rise to prominence and the great pleasure he took in his success attracted criticism, and his posthumous reputation took a savage mauling from Victorian critics, one of whom dubbed him 'The Monarch of Mediocrity'. But even at his critical nadir, West's most celebrated work, The Death of General Wolfe, commemorating the British victory at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1771, continued to fascinate. Although it was not, as is sometimes claimed, the first history painting to feature contemporary costume, it was the first picture in such a vein to become a critical and popular success in Britain. West remains today the most neglected and misunderstood of Britain's great eighteenth-century artists, lacking the social bite of Hogarth, the bravura of Reynolds or the easy elegance of Gainsborough. Nor was he a forceful writer (unlike Hogarth and Reynolds), and he did not possess the intellectual credentials to which so many of his fellow artists aspired. And yet, as Loyd Grossman asserts in his new book, West was extraordinarily in tune with the artistic and intellectual currents that swirled through his turbulent times. He was in the vanguard of both Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and among the very first artists to give visual expression to the exciting and heroic qualities of contemporary events, as opposed to episodes dredged up from the biblical, classical or mythological past, which had long enjoyed the highest artistic status. West's Wolfe was painted at a time when Europeans were just beginning to abandon the tendency to look backwards. Men and women of letters, philosophers and historians were increasingly convinced that modernity could equal and even surpass the achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This new-found ability to believe in the value of the present and to look forward to a progressive future is very much the foundation of the 'modern' attitude that has affected the way we live and think ever since. While acknowledging that West's reputation is still precarious, Grossman explains why Wolfe was such an instant success and why this thrilling work of art continues to exercise such a strong grip on our imaginations nearly 250 years after it was first shown to the public. He situates West in the midst of Enlightenment thinking about history and modernity, and seeks to demolish some of the prejudices about the talent and intentions of the young man from the Pennsylvania frontier who attained such eminence at the British court.
Author: Edmund Burke Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520246614 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 452
Book Description
Middle Eastern societies and ordinary people's lives / Edmund Burke III and David N. Yaghoubian -- Precolonial lives -- Assaf: a peasant of Mount Lebanon / Akram F. Khater and Antoine F. Khater -- Shemsigul: a circassian slave in mid-nineteenth-century Cairo / Ehud R. Toledano -- Journeymen textile weavers in nineteenth-century Damascus: a collective / Sherry Vatter -- Ahmad: a Kuwaiti pearl diver / Nels Johnson -- Mohand N'Hamoucha: Middle Atlas Berber / Edmund Burke III -- Bibi Maryam: a Bakhtiyari tribal woman / Julie Oehler -- Colonial lives -- The Shaykh and his daughter: coping in colonial Algeria / Julia Clancy-Smith -- Izz al-Din al-Qassam: preacher and mujahid / Abdullah Schleifer -- Abu Ali al-Kilawi: a Damascus qabaday / Philip S. Khoury -- M'hamed Ali: Tunisian labor organizer / Eqbal Ahmad and Stuart Schaar -- Hagob Hagobian: an Armenian truck driver in Iran / David N. Yaghoubian -- Naji: an Iraqi country doctor / Sami Zubaida -- Post-Colonial lives -- Migdim: Egyptian bedouin matriarch / Lila Abu-Lughod -- Rostam: Qashqai rebel / Lois Beck -- An Iranian village boyhood / Mehdi Abedi and Michael M. [ths] J. Fischer -- Gulab: an Afghan schoolteacher / Ashraf Ghani -- Abu Jamal: a Palestinian urban villager / Joost Hiltermann -- Haddou: a Moroccan migrant worker / David Mcmurray -- Contemporary lives -- Nasir: Sa'idi youth between Islamism and agriculture -- Fanny colonna -- Ghada: village rebel or political protestor? / Celia Rothenberg -- Khanom gohary: Iranian community leader / Homa Hoodfar -- Nadia: mother of the believers / Baya Gacemi -- June leavitt: West Bank settler / Tamara neuman -- Talal Rizk: a Syrian engineer in the Gulf / Michael Provence.
Author: Archbishop Averky (Taushev) Publisher: Holy Trinity Publications ISBN: 0884653749 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
Archbishop Averky addresses head on the question, "What is asceticism?" He counters the many false understandings that exist and shows that the practice of authentic asceticism is integral to the spiritual life and the path to blessed communion with God.
Author: Melvyn Goldstein Publisher: M.E. Sharpe ISBN: 9780765631787 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
This autobiography of a Tibetan nationalist with a burning desire to reform and modernize the old society presents for the first time a personal portrait of Tibet that is realistic -- neither a feudal hell, as Beijing would have it, nor Shangrila, as many sympathetic outsiders would have it. Tashi's moving story, beginning with his humble early circumstances, covers his search for education in Tibet and the United States, his return to China/Tibet in early 1964, and his life in China, especially during the Cultural Revolution when he was charged as an American spy and imprisoned. Finally exonerated, Tashi became a professor of English at Tibet University and went on to found in 1985 the first English night school in Lhasa. Now retired, he devotes all his efforts to raising funds to build rural schools in his home province, where his still illiterate relatives live.
Author: Jean E. Howard Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 113486650X Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 198
Book Description
A ground-breaking study of the social and cultural functions of the early modern theatre. Jean Howard looks at the effects of drama and the stage on early modern culture in an exciting and eminently readable work.
Author: Rana Mitter Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780192806055 Category : China Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan.
Author: Stephen Spender
Author: Stephen Spender
Author: Daniel H. Nexon
Author: Loyd Grossman
Author: Robert F. Freeland
Author: Edmund Burke
Author: Archbishop Averky (Taushev)
Author: Melvyn Goldstein
Author: Jean E. Howard
Author: Rana Mitter
Author: Stephen Spender