The Illiberal Imagination

The Illiberal Imagination PDF Author: Joe Shapiro
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813940524
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The Illiberal Imagination offers a synthetic, historical formalist account of how—and to what end—U.S. novels from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1850s represented economic inequality and radical forms of economic egalitarianism in the new nation. In conversation with intellectual, social, and labor history, this study tracks the representation of class inequality and conflict across five subgenres of the early U.S. novel: the Bildungsroman, the episodic travel narrative, the sentimental novel, the frontier romance, and the anti-slavery novel. Through close readings of the works of foundational U.S. novelists, including Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joe Shapiro demonstrates that while voices of economic egalitarianism and working-class protest find their ways into a variety of early U.S. novels, these novels are anything but radically dialogic; instead, he argues, they push back against emergent forms of class consciousness by working to naturalize class inequality among whites. The Illiberal Imagination thus enhances our understanding of both the early U.S. novel and the history of the way that class has been imagined in the United States.

The Illiberal Imagination

The Illiberal Imagination PDF Author: Joe Shapiro
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813940524
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Illiberal Imagination offers a synthetic, historical formalist account of how—and to what end—U.S. novels from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1850s represented economic inequality and radical forms of economic egalitarianism in the new nation. In conversation with intellectual, social, and labor history, this study tracks the representation of class inequality and conflict across five subgenres of the early U.S. novel: the Bildungsroman, the episodic travel narrative, the sentimental novel, the frontier romance, and the anti-slavery novel. Through close readings of the works of foundational U.S. novelists, including Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joe Shapiro demonstrates that while voices of economic egalitarianism and working-class protest find their ways into a variety of early U.S. novels, these novels are anything but radically dialogic; instead, he argues, they push back against emergent forms of class consciousness by working to naturalize class inequality among whites. The Illiberal Imagination thus enhances our understanding of both the early U.S. novel and the history of the way that class has been imagined in the United States.

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

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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.

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

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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.

Liberal Epic

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

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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

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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.

Liberalism

Liberalism PDF Author: Michael Freeden
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199670439
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Michael Freeden explores the concept of liberalism, one of the longest-standing and central political theories and ideologies. Combining a variety of approaches, he distinguishes between liberalism as a political movement, as a system of ideas, and as a series of ethical and philosophical principles.

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

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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.

The Post-Liberal Imagination

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

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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.

Reactionary Democracy

Reactionary Democracy PDF Author: Aurelien Mondon
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788734246
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Democracy is not necessarily progressive, and will only be if we make it so. What Mondon and Winter call 'reactionary democracy' is the use of the concept of democracy and its associated understanding of the power to the people (demos cratos) for reactionary ends. The resurgence of racism, populism and the far right is not the result of popular demands as we are often told. It is rather the logical conclusion of the more or less conscious manipulation by the elite of the concept of 'the people' and the working class to push reactionary ideas. These narratives place racism as a popular demand, rather than as something encouraged and perpetuated by elites, thus exonerating those with the means to influence and control public discourse through the media in particular. This in turn has legitimised the far right, strengthened its hand and compounded inequalities. These actions diverts us away from real concerns and radical alternatives to the current system. Through a careful and thorough deconstruction of the hegemonic discourse currently preventing us from thinking beyond the liberal vs populist dichotomy, this book develops a better understanding of the systemic forces underpinning our current model and its exploitative and discriminatory basis. The book shows us that the far right would not have been able to achieve such success, either electorally or ideologically, were it not for the help of elite actors (the media, politicians and academics). While the far right is a real threat and should not be left off the hook, the authors argue that we need to shift the responsibility of the situation towards those who too often claim to be objective, and even powerless, bystanders despite their powerful standpoint and clear capacity to influence the agenda, public discourse, and narratives, particularly when they platform and legitimise racist and far right ideas and actors.

The Conservative Turn

The Conservative Turn PDF Author: Michael Kimmage
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674032583
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Kimmage focuses on the relationship between Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers to explore the birth of neoconservatism.