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Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today. More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson--and later William Jam...
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This first fully annotated critical edition of A Small Boy and Others, which guides the reader through the allusive complexities of James's prose, offers fresh insights into the formative years of one of literature's most influential figures.
'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.' So begins F. R. Leavis's most controversial book, The Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical-polemical survey of English fiction, first published in 1948. Leavis makes his case for moral seriousness as the necessary criterion for an author's inclusion in any list of the finest novelists. In the course of his argument he adds D. H. Lawrence to the pantheon, and singles out Hard Times as Dickens' one 'completely serious work of art'; while Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and James Joyce are among those weighed in the balance and found wanting. '[Leavis] gave one a new idea of what it meant to read... the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality.' Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
As the title of his new book suggests, Richard Poirier believes that the United States has been uncommonly hospitable to literary and artistic experimentation, to innovation and daring. Just as the nation likes to imagine itself as always in a state of becoming and renewal, some of its greatest writers have seemed willing to accept a measure of neglect during their lifetimes in return for the promise of posthumous triumph.
"An exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers." - New Republic "Funny and wise enough to charm the gravity from a rainbow...All five of the pieces have unusual narrative vigor and inventiveness." - New York Times Compiling five short stories originally written between 1959 and 1964, Slow Learner showcases Thomas Pynchon’s writing before the publication of his first novel V. The stories compiled here are “The Small Rain,” “Low-lands,” “Entropy,” “Under the Rose,” and “The Secret Integration,” along with an introduction by Pynchon himself that Time magazine calls his "first public gesture toward autobiography."
Richard Poirier's A World Elsewhere, originally published in 1966 by the Oxford University Press, is a signal book in American literature and literary history. Widely acclaimed upon publication, it has since taken its place among a handful of books considered mandatory reading for all students and scholars in the field. Poirier's classic work, hailed both for its original thesis and for its stylistic elegance and clarity, is once again made available in this new Wisconsin paperback edition.
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism—with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth—lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. Since the 1960s, however, pragmatism in many guises has again gained prominence, finding congenial places to flourish within growing intellectual movements. This volume of new essays brings together leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, social thinkers, and literary critics to examine the far-reaching effects of this revival. As the twenty-five intellectuals who take part in this discussion sh...
Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer -- all are ex-friends of Norman Podhoretz, the renowned editor and critic and leading member of the group of New York intellectuals who came to be known as "the Family." As only a family member could, Podhoretz tells the story of these friendships, once central to his life, and shows how the political and cultural struggles of the past fifty years made them impossible to sustain. With wit, piercing insight, and startling honesty, we are introduced as never before to a type of person for whom ideas were often matters of life and death, and whose passing from the scene has left so large a gap in Americ...