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Character and Culture by Irving Babbitt is the latest volume in the Library of Conservative Thought. Babbitt was the leader of the twentieth-century intellectual and cultural movement called American Humanism or the New Humanism. More than half a century after his death his intellectual staying power remains undiminished. The qualities that marked Irving Babbitt as a thinker and cultural critic of the first rank are richly represented in Character and Culture. First published togetherin 1940 (under the misleading title Spanish Character), these essays span his scholarly career and cover a wide range of subjects. The diverse topics discussed here-aesthetics, ethics, religion, politics, litera...
"I've worried some about why write books when presidents and senators and generals do not read them, and the university experience taught me a very good reason: you catch people before they become generals and senators and presidents, and you poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world." — Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut's desire to save the planet from environmental and military destruction, to enact change by telling stories that both critique and embrace humanity, sets him apart from many of the postmodern authors who rose to prominence during the 1960s and 1970s. This new look at Vonnegut's oeuvre examines his insistence that writing is an "act of good citizensh...
"Examines the artwork of Hammatt Billings, George Cruikshank, Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Thomas Satterwhite Noble to show how, as Uncle Tom's Cabin gained popularity, visual strategies were used to coax the subversive potential of Stowe's work back within accepted boundaries that reinforced social hierarchies"--Provided by publisher.
From about 1740 to 1850, evangelical Protestantism became a major cultural force in virtually all areas of America. Emerging from this religious movement was a rich vernacular literature of conversion narratives and spiritual autobiographies--writings in which believers described their own salvation in hopes of converting others. In The Self and the Sacred, Rodger M. Payne examines these neglected texts in depth, focusing particularly on what they reveal about notions of selfhood and how those notions were incorporated into Christian orthodoxy. As Payne explains, conversion narratives point to a fascinating paradox that became evident among evangelicals as they were confronted by the disrupt...
Covering half a century, from 1895 to 1945, The Allure of the Nation examines three interlocking aspects of Chinese nationalist modernity: (1) the quest to balance global connectivity and ethnic authenticity; (2) the desire to balance national unity and local autonomy; (3) the drive to balance history’s place as a tool of political propaganda and as a weapon used to critique orthodoxy and political suppression. By viewing the nation as a cluster of spatial-temporal relations that link individuals to a territorial state, this book provides a different view of early twentieth-century China where the party-state did not have full control of political and cultural affairs, and alternative political perspectives (such as local self-government and democratic aristocracy) could be freely expressed.
"Early American Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T. Meserole, a timely collection that reflects changing conceptions of the field, contains studies by leading scholars and celebrates the achievements of Harrison T. Meserole--colonialist, bibliographer, and Shakespeare scholar extraordinaire. These dynamic essays deal with areas at the forefront of current research, such as popular culture, minority and non-Anglo writings, recanonization, genre studies, and Anglo-American links. All the contributors were Meserole's students sometime during the twenty-eight years he taught at The Pennsylvania State University, and all have established their own scholarly reputations since then....
A study of the emerging cultural model of "cosmodernism"
Through two previous editions, The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric has not only introduced new scholars to interdisciplinary research but also become a standard research tool in a number of fields and pointed the way toward future study. Adopting research methodologies of revision and recovery, this latest edition includes all new material while still following the format of the original and is constructed around bibliographical surveys of both primary and secondary works addressing the Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth through twentieth century periods within the history of rhetoric. The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rheto...
Avihu Zakai analyzes Jonathan Edwards's redemptive mode of historical thought in the context of the Enlightenment. As theologian and philosopher, Edwards has long been a towering figure in American intellectual history. Nevertheless, and despite Edwards's intense engagement with the nature of time and the meaning of history, there has been no serious attempt to explore his philosophy of history. Offering the first such exploration, Zakai considers Edwards's historical thought as a reaction, in part, to the varieties of Enlightenment historical narratives and their growing disregard for theistic considerations. Zakai analyzes the ideological origins of Edwards's insistence that the process of...