John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith PDF full book. Access full book title John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith by Kieran Quinlan. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Kieran Quinlan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807124680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Get Book Here
Book Description
Recent interest in the life and works of John Crowe Ransom has brought to light the many apparent contradictions and discontinuities in the career of this important man of letters. A noted poet, Ransom chose to devote his energies primarily to the composition of prose. A southern agrarian in the 1930s, he later rejected the movement as nostalgic and unrealistic. But perhaps more central to his development as a man of letters, he came to renounce all traditional religious beliefs, even though he was descended from a line of Methodist ministers. In John Crowe Ransom’s Secular Faith Keiran Quinlan examines these and other incongruities within the context of the writer’s career and offers a substantially revisionist interpretation of his subject. Quinlan argues that the key to understanding Ransom’s development lies in “his early rejection of the tenets of Christian theology and in his consequent effort at articulating an alternative philosophy to live by.” Ransom’s literary efforts are viewed as a philosophical project aimed at discovering an empirical validity for the world rather than a transcendental one. Quinlan examines Ransom’s development against the background of the literary and philosophic movements that influenced the writer. He shows how thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Dewey, and the logical positivists, and poets like Arnold, Hardy, Stevens, Eliot, and Graves, all made significant contributions to Ransom’s progress. Although Ransom has often been allied with T.S. Eliot, who turned to religion and a transcendental knowledge of the world, Quinlan contends that Ransom’s real sympathies were with Wallace Stevens, who south a suitable substitute for religious faith in the celebration of a world he felt was emptied of its transcendental component. Ransom’s difficulties are in many ways symptomatic of the struggles of our age—the supplanting of God and a supernatural world view by scientific advances, the loss of faith, and thus the need to find an alternative meaning in existence. Quinlan stresses that although the gradual emergence of Ransom’s “secular faith” was a direct result of his lifelong dialogue with the Christian tradition, his final belief was that “‘this is the best of all possible worlds’; inasmuch as it is not possible for imagination to acquaint is with any other world.” Quinlan concludes, therefore, that Ransom belongs squarely in the American pragmatist tradition.
Author: Kieran Quinlan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807124680
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Get Book Here
Book Description
Recent interest in the life and works of John Crowe Ransom has brought to light the many apparent contradictions and discontinuities in the career of this important man of letters. A noted poet, Ransom chose to devote his energies primarily to the composition of prose. A southern agrarian in the 1930s, he later rejected the movement as nostalgic and unrealistic. But perhaps more central to his development as a man of letters, he came to renounce all traditional religious beliefs, even though he was descended from a line of Methodist ministers. In John Crowe Ransom’s Secular Faith Keiran Quinlan examines these and other incongruities within the context of the writer’s career and offers a substantially revisionist interpretation of his subject. Quinlan argues that the key to understanding Ransom’s development lies in “his early rejection of the tenets of Christian theology and in his consequent effort at articulating an alternative philosophy to live by.” Ransom’s literary efforts are viewed as a philosophical project aimed at discovering an empirical validity for the world rather than a transcendental one. Quinlan examines Ransom’s development against the background of the literary and philosophic movements that influenced the writer. He shows how thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Dewey, and the logical positivists, and poets like Arnold, Hardy, Stevens, Eliot, and Graves, all made significant contributions to Ransom’s progress. Although Ransom has often been allied with T.S. Eliot, who turned to religion and a transcendental knowledge of the world, Quinlan contends that Ransom’s real sympathies were with Wallace Stevens, who south a suitable substitute for religious faith in the celebration of a world he felt was emptied of its transcendental component. Ransom’s difficulties are in many ways symptomatic of the struggles of our age—the supplanting of God and a supernatural world view by scientific advances, the loss of faith, and thus the need to find an alternative meaning in existence. Quinlan stresses that although the gradual emergence of Ransom’s “secular faith” was a direct result of his lifelong dialogue with the Christian tradition, his final belief was that “‘this is the best of all possible worlds’; inasmuch as it is not possible for imagination to acquaint is with any other world.” Quinlan concludes, therefore, that Ransom belongs squarely in the American pragmatist tradition.
Author: Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807133835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 440
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system. As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie. Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art. The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political orientation of southern literature by examining a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.
Author: Michael LeMahieu
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199890404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Get Book Here
Book Description
Fictions of Fact and Value looks at logical positivism's major influence on the development of postwar American fiction, charting a literary and philosophical genealogy that has been absent from criticism on the American novel since 1945.
Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807152838
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 457
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the last decade of his life, Robert Penn Warren remained a vibrant force in American literature, producing new works of poetry and nonfiction while also dealing courageously with the gradual decline of his health and the diminishment of his poetic powers. Toward Sunset, at a Great Height, 1980--1989, the sixth and final volume of the author's selected letters, provides crucial documentation of this period, containing Warren's correspondence with friends, family, fellow writers, editors, critics, and the scholars studying his works. Warren published several volumes of poetry, including Being Here (1980), Rumor Verified (1981), and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983), and returned to nonfiction prose with Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1980) and the memoir Portrait of a Father (1988). His letters reveal that he tried to begin writing a novel but was unable to make substantial progress on it, and that from 1985 on he became increasingly dissatisfied with his new poems. Until his death at age eighty-four, however, Warren maintained an active correspondence filled with news about his writings and travels, accounts of the lives of his wife and children, and a stoic attitude about his own physical decline as well as a solicitousness regarding the health of others, such as his brother, Thomas, and sister, Mary. He communicated with rising young scholars and encouraged younger poets he admired. Toward Sunset, at a Great Height offers rich insights into the closing chapter of Robert Penn Warren's professional and personal life, making it an essential resource for understanding the full scope of the author's contribution to American letters.
Author: Kieran Quinlan
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813232716
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Get Book Here
Book Description
Seamus Heaney & the End of Catholic Ireland takes off from the poet’s growing awareness in the new millennium of “something far more important in my mental formation than cultural nationalism or the British presence or any of that stuff—namely, my early religious education.” It then pursues an examination of the full trajectory of Heaney’s religious beliefs as represented in his poetry, prose, and interviews, with a briefer account of the interactive religious histories of the Irish and international contexts in which he lived. Thus, in the 1940s and 50s, Heaney was inducted into the narrow, punitive, but also enabling Catholicism of the era. In the early 1960s he was witness to the lively religious debates from the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich’s Honest to God to the seismic disruptions of Vatican II. When the conflict in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants broke out, Heaney was forced to dig deep for an imaginative understanding of its religious roots. From the 1980s on, Heaney more and more proclaimed his own religious loss while also recognizing the institution’s residual value in an Irish society of rising prosperity, weariness with the atrocities of a partly religion-inspired IRA, and beset by the scandals of sex abuse among the clergy. Kieran Quinlan sees Heaney as an exemplar of this period of major change in Ireland as he engaged the religious issue not only in major writers such as James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin, and Czeslaw Miłosz, but also in a diverse array of less familiar commentators lay and clerical, creative and academic, believers and unbelievers, Irish and international. Breaking new ground by expanding the scope of Heaney’s religious preoccupations and writing in an accessible, reflective, and sometimes provocative manner, Quinlan’s study places Heaney in his universe, and that universe in turn in its wider intellectual setting.
Author: Kieran Quinlan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807141427
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: W. Calvin Dickinson
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572330320
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474
Get Book Here
Book Description
With some 6,000 entries, A Bibliography of Tennessee History will prove to be an invaluable resource for anyone--students, historians, librarians, genealogists--engaged in researching Tennessee's rich and colorful past. A sequel to Sam B. Smith's invaluable 1973 work, Tennessee History: A Bibliography, this book follows a similar format and includes published books and essays, as well as many unpublished theses and dissertations, that have become available during the intervening years. The volume begins with sections on Reference, Natural History, and Native Americans. Its divisions then follow the major periods of the state's history: Before Statehood, State Development, Civil War, Late Nineteenth Century, Early Twentieth Century, and Late Twentieth Century. Sections on Literature and County Histories round out the book. Included is a helpful subject index that points the reader to particular persons, places, incidents, or topics. Substantial sections in this index highlight women's history and African American history, two areas in which scholarship has proliferated during the past two decades. The history of entertainment in Tennessee is also well represented in this volume, including, for example, hundreds of citations for writings about Elvis Presley and for works that treat Nashville and Memphis as major show business centers. The Literature section, meanwhile, includes citations for fiction and poetry relating to Tennessee history as well as for critical works about Tennessee writers. Throughout, the editors have strived to achieve a balance between comprehensive coverage and the need to be selective. The result is a volume that will benefit researchers for years to come. The Editors: W. Calvin Dickinson is professor of history at Tennessee Technological University. Eloise R. Hitchcock is head reference librarian at the University of the South.
Author: Kieran Quinlan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807129838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Get Book Here
Book Description
The ties between Ireland and the American South span four centuries and include shared ancestries, cultures, and sympathies. The striking parallels between the two regions are all the more fascinating because, studded with contrasts, they are so complex. Kieran Quinlan, a native of Ireland who now resides in Alabama, is ideally suited to offer the first in-depth exploration of this neglected subject, which he does to a brilliant degree in Strange Kin. The Irish relationship to the American South is unique, Quinlan explains, in that it involves both kin and kinship. He shows how a significant component of the southern population has Irish origins that are far more tangled than the simplistic distinction between Protestant Scotch Irish and plain Catholic Irish. African and Native Americans, too, have identified with the Irish through comparable experiences of subjugation, displacement, and starvation. The civil rights movement in the South and the peace initiative in Northern Ireland illustrate the tense intertwining that Quinlan addresses. He offers a detailed look at the connections between Irish nationalists and the Confederate cause, revealing remarkably similar historical trajectories in Ireland and the South. Both suffered defeat; both have long been seen as problematic, if also highly romanticized, areas of otherwise "progressive" nations; both have been identified with religious prejudices; and both have witnessed bitter disputes as to the interpretation of their respective "lost causes." Quinlan also examines the unexpected twentieth-century literary flowering in Ireland and the South -- as exemplified by Irish writers W. B.Yeats, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bowen, and southern authors William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. Sophisticated as well as entertaining, Strange Kin represents a benchmark in Irish-American cultural studies. Its close consideration of the familial and circumstantial resemblances between Ireland and the South will foster an enhanced understanding of each place separately, as well as of the larger British and American polities.
Author: Jonathan McGregor
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807176516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Get Book Here
Book Description
Popular perceptions of American writers as either godless radicals or God-fearing reactionaries overlook a vital tradition of Christian leftist thought and creative work. In Communion of Radicals, Jonathan McGregor offers the first literary history of theologically conservative writers who embraced political radicalism, as their reverence for tradition impelled them to work for social justice. Challenging recent accounts that examine twentieth-century American literature against the backdrop of the rising Religious Right, Communion of Radicals uncovers a different literary lineage in which allegiance to religious tradition fostered dedication to a more just future. From the Gilded Age to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, traditional faith empowered the rebellious writing of socialists, anarchists, and Catholic personalists such as Vida Scudder, Dorothy Day, Claude McKay, F. O. Matthiessen, and W. H. Auden. By recovering their strain of traditioned radicalism, McGregor shows how strong faith in the past can fuel the struggle for an equitable future. As Christian socialists, Scudder and Ralph Adams Cram envisioned their movement for beloved community as a modern version of medieval monasticism. Day and the Catholic Workers followed the fourteenth-century example of St. Francis when they lived and wrote among the disaffected souls on the Bowery during the Great Depression. Tennessee’s Fellowship of Southern Churchmen argued for a socialist and antiracist understanding of the notion of “the South and the Agrarian tradition” popularized by James McBride Dabbs, Walker Percy, and Wendell Berry. Agrarian roots flowered into creative expressions encompassing the queer and Black medievalist poetry of Auden and McKay, respectively; Matthiessen’s Catholic socialist interpretation of the American Renaissance; and the genteel anarchism of Percy’s southern comic novels. Imaginative writing enabled these Christian leftists to commune with the past and with each other, driving their radical efforts in the present. Communion of Radicals chronicles a literary Christian left that unites deeply traditional faith with radicalism, and offers a usable past that disrupts perceived alignments of religion and politics.
Author: Aaron Shaheen
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572337117
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Get Book Here
Book Description
Androgynous Democracy examines how the notions of gender equality propounded by transcendentalists and other nineteenth-century writers were further developed and complicated by the rise of literary modernism. Aaron Shaheen specifically investigates the ways in which intellectual discussions of androgyny, once detached from earlier gonadal-based models, were used by various American authors to formulate their own paradigms of democratic national cohesion. Indeed, Henry James, Frank Norris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Crowe Ransom, Grace Lumpkin, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marita Bonner all expressed a deep fascination with androgyny—an interest that bore directly on their thoughts about some of the most prominent issues America confronted as it moved into the first decades of the twentieth century. Shaheen not only considers the work of each of these seven writers individually, but he also reveals the interconnectedness of their ideas. He shows that Henry James used the concept of androgyny to make sense of the discord between the North and the South in the years immediately following the Civil War, while Norris and Gilman used it to formulate a new model of citizenship in the wake of America’s industrial ascendancy. The author next explores the uses Ransom and Lumpkin made of androgyny in assessing the threat of radicalism once the Great Depression had weakened the country’s faith in both capitalism and religious fundamentalism. Finally, he looks at how androgyny was instrumental in the discussions of racial uplift and urban migration generated by Du Bois and Bonner. Thoroughly documented, this engrossing volume will be a valuable resource in the fields of American literary criticism, feminism and gender theory, queer theory, and politics and nationalism. Aaron Shaheen is UC Foundation Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He has published articles in the Southern Literary Journal, American Literary Realism, and the Henry James Review.
