The Liberal Imagination

The Liberal Imagination PDF Author: Lionel Trilling
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590175514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

The Liberal Imagination

The Liberal Imagination PDF Author: Lionel Trilling
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590172833
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

The Liberal Imagination

The Liberal Imagination PDF Author: Lionel Trilling
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1590172833
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

Liberal Epic

Liberal Epic PDF Author: Edward Adams
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
In Liberal Epic, Edward Adams examines the liberal imagination’s centuries-long dependence on contradictory, and mutually constitutive, attitudes toward violent domination. Adams centers his ambitious analysis on a series of major epic poems, histories, and historical novels, including Dryden’s Aeneid, Pope’s Iliad, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Byron’s Don Juan, Scott’s Life of Napoleon, Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Macaulay’s History of England, Hardy’s Dynasts, and Churchill’s military histories—works that rank among the most important publishing events of the past three centuries yet that have seldom received critical attention relative to their importance. In recovering these neglected works and gathering them together as part of a self-conscious literary tradition here defined as liberal epic, Adams provides an archaeology that sheds light on contemporary issues such as the relation of liberalism to war, the tactics for sanitizing heroism, and the appeal of violence to supposedly humane readers. Victorian Literature and Culture Series

The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination

The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination PDF Author: Tony Kushner
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631194835
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination attempts to explain and not to condemn the responses and reactions of the democratic world to the attempted destruction of European Jewry. It concentrates on the impact of the Holocaust on ordinary people in the democracies and examines the actions of the nation-state in the light of popular responses. Ultimately this study argues that the Holocaust is not simply German, Jewish or continental history but is an integral but neglected part of the experience of many countries away from the killing fields. It is the first social and cultural history of its subject.

The Post-Liberal Imagination

The Post-Liberal Imagination PDF Author: Bruce Baum
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137560347
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
In The Post-Liberal Imagination , Bruce Baum approaches American liberalism 'in a critical spirit' by examining the relationship between popular culture and politics. The book analyzes movies, television, and popular music to rethink the liberal views of democracy, equality, racism, dissent, and animal rights in the Bush-Obama era.

Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination

Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination PDF Author: Theodore Koditschek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139494880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on the Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.

Sovereignty and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination

Sovereignty and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination PDF Author: Scott G. Nelson
Publisher:
ISBN: 0415777844
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
This is a study of the concept of sovereignty in the modern epoch. For too long modern political theory has assumed the subject; it has also assumed the state. This book asks how each are effected in history through liberal-Enlightenment ethical and political affirmations which anchor themselves in a unique metaphysics of statecraft.

SINCERITY AND AUTHENTICITY

SINCERITY AND AUTHENTICITY PDF Author: Lionel TRILLING
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044460
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
“Now and then,” writes Lionel Trilling, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent PDF Author: Lionel Trilling
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466832142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 753

Book Description
A landmark reissue of a great teacher's finest work Lionel Trilling was, during his lifetime, generally acknowledged to be one of the finest essayists in the English language, the heir of Hazlitt and the peer of Orwell. Since his death in 1974, his work has been discussed and hotly debated, yet today, when writers and critics claim to be "for" or "against" his interpretations, they can hardly be well acquainted with them, for his work has been largely out of print for years. With this re-publication of Trilling's finest essays, Leon Wieseltier offers readers of many new generations a rich overview of Trilling's achievement. The essays collected here include justly celebrated masterpieces--on Mansfield Park and on "Why We Read Jane Austen"; on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Isaac Babel; on Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost; on "Art and Neurosis"; and the famous Preface to Trilling's book The Liberal Imagination. This exhilarating work has much to teach readers who may have been encouraged to adopt simpler systems of meaning, or were taught to exchange the ideals of reason and individuality for those of enthusiasm and the false romance of group identity. Trilling's remarkable essays show a critic who was philosophically motivated and textually responsible, alive to history but not in thrall to it, exercised by art but not worshipful of it, consecrated to ideas but suspicious of theory.
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