Evelyn Barish began this book partly to inquire into a silence--Ralph Waldo Emerson's failure to discuss or mourn his father, who died when the boy was seven years old. As she probed the meaning of this loss, she found herself tracing the development of an American prophet, producing a detailed intellectual biography of Emerson's early years up to the writing of Nature. In the process she has painted a vivid picture of American society of the period and of Emerson's unusual family--including his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a brilliant and eccentric woman, who was described by Emerson as spinning at a higher velocity than all the other tops but who also rode around Concord in her shroud! In the years after the death of William Emerson, Mary Moody Emerson came to help her widowed sister-in-law, Ruth, rear her five sons and thus became a deep influence on the young Ralph Waldo. Barish reveals the complexities of the Emersons' family life, the preoccupations with death and questions of sexual identity in the Romantic fantasies that Emerson wrote as a youth, the emotional struggles of his student years at Harvard, and his private study of the unsettling ideas of the skeptical philosopher David Hume. Pursuing a series of small clues, she clears up the obscurity surrounding the crucial breakdown of his health during the vocational crisis of his twenties. Finally, she traces his path out of fear and self-doubt into autonomy, as he overcame crippling grief after the death of his first wife. Barish makes it clear how Emerson the American classic thinker emerged from a welter of conflicts and handicaps previously obscure to us. How did he free himself from the rigor mortis of his own cultural and personal past--from what he called the "corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College"--to become the liberator of America from the intellectual shackles of its colonial experience? Her answer redefines Emerson's "self-reliance" not in traditional transcendent or idealistic terms but as the result of real life and hard struggle--experience "passed through the fire of thought." Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Describes the life of the Yale University professor behind the deconstruction movement, who at the time of his death was one of the most influential literary critics in America but was later revealed to be a Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite.
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), poet, skeptic, friend of Emerson and of Matthew Arnold, was a man concerned with the religious, political, and social issues of the turbulent times in which he lived. In this fresh examination of Clough, Greenberger traces the intellectual development of a poet who was considered a brilliant failure in his own day, a reputation that still persists despite the fact that Clough is now attracting considerable critical attention. Her study contradicts this traditional view of him as ineffectual and uncommitted and reveals instead a complex figure whose varied interests enriched his prose and poetry. Greenberger has made a thorough study of all of Clough's prose on contemporary issues written between 1837 and 1853. These largely neglected writings, many of which remain unpublished, enable her to follow the poet's development through religious doubts and conflicts and to trace his political metamorphosis from naive idealism through radicalism to a final disenchantment with utopias. Having placed the poet's work in its proper historical context, the author goes on to reveal the great extent to which Clough succeeded in making the issues of his day viable subjects for poetry. Greenberger, thoroughly versed in the intellectual history of the Victorian period, vividly depicts the English social and economic scene and contemporary life at unreformed Oxford. She suggests new insights into Clough's relations with Emerson, the influence of Carlyle upon the poet, and his reactions to the America of the early 1850's. The author concludes that the techniques Clough developed for presenting his ideas in poetic form and the concerns that pervaded his thinking make him a precursor of twentieth-century literature. In the last chapter she relates her findings to Clough's three major poems. She includes in an appendix a number of new poems and other material by Clough found in manuscript during her research.
In this fresh examination of Clough, Greenberger traces the intellectual development of a poet who was considered a brilliant failure in his own day, a reputation that still persists despite the fact that Clough is now attracting considerable critical attention. Her study contradicts this traditional view of him as ineffectual and uncommitted and reveals instead a complex figure whose varied interests enriched his prose and poetry.
Collected for the first time in a single volume: all of the short fiction by one of the 20th century's wittiest and most trenchant observers of the human comedy.
Evelyn Waugh was a loving Husband, a wise and affectionate father and the funniest English novelist of the century. This selection of letters does full justice to these splendid attribute's " Phillip Toynbee.
Travel in Africa,the English aristocracy,the bungling and courage of military life,post-1945 America, all these are favourable sites for the diaries of one of the harshest and funniest English novelists of this century.
A work of art as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done" (New Yorker), The Loved One is Evelyn Waugh's cutting satire of 1940s California and the Anglo-American cultural divide. Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday--and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art. Waugh's dark and savage satire depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.
Evelyn Barish began this book partly to inquire into a silence--Ralph Waldo Emerson's failure to discuss or mourn his father, who died when the boy was seven years old. As she probed the meaning of this loss, she found herself tracing the development of an American prophet, producing a detailed intellectual biography of Emerson's early years up to the writing of Nature. In the process she has painted a vivid picture of American society of the period and of Emerson's unusual family--including his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a brilliant and eccentric woman, who was described by Emerson as spinning at a higher velocity than all the other tops but who also rode around Concord in her shroud! In the years after the death of William Emerson, Mary Moody Emerson came to help her widowed sister-in-law, Ruth, rear her five sons and thus became a deep influence on the young Ralph Waldo. Barish reveals the complexities of the Emersons' family life, the preoccupations with death and questions of sexual identity in the Romantic fantasies that Emerson wrote as a youth, the emotional struggles of his student years at Harvard, and his private study of the unsettling ideas of the skeptical philosopher David Hume. Pursuing a series of small clues, she clears up the obscurity surrounding the crucial breakdown of his health during the vocational crisis of his twenties. Finally, she traces his path out of fear and self-doubt into autonomy, as he overcame crippling grief after the death of his first wife. Barish makes it clear how Emerson the American classic thinker emerged from a welter of conflicts and handicaps previously obscure to us. How did he free himself from the rigor mortis of his own cultural and personal past--from what he called the "corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College"--to become the liberator of America from the intellectual shackles of its colonial experience? Her answer redefines Emerson's "self-reliance" not in traditional transcendent or idealistic terms but as the result of real life and hard struggle--experience "passed through the fire of thought." Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Describes the life of the Yale University professor behind the deconstruction movement, who at the time of his death was one of the most influential literary critics in America but was later revealed to be a Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite.
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), poet, skeptic, friend of Emerson and of Matthew Arnold, was a man concerned with the religious, political, and social issues of the turbulent times in which he lived. In this fresh examination of Clough, Greenberger traces the intellectual development of a poet who was considered a brilliant failure in his own day, a reputation that still persists despite the fact that Clough is now attracting considerable critical attention. Her study contradicts this traditional view of him as ineffectual and uncommitted and reveals instead a complex figure whose varied interests enriched his prose and poetry. Greenberger has made a thorough study of all of Clough's prose on contemporary issues written between 1837 and 1853. These largely neglected writings, many of which remain unpublished, enable her to follow the poet's development through religious doubts and conflicts and to trace his political metamorphosis from naive idealism through radicalism to a final disenchantment with utopias. Having placed the poet's work in its proper historical context, the author goes on to reveal the great extent to which Clough succeeded in making the issues of his day viable subjects for poetry. Greenberger, thoroughly versed in the intellectual history of the Victorian period, vividly depicts the English social and economic scene and contemporary life at unreformed Oxford. She suggests new insights into Clough's relations with Emerson, the influence of Carlyle upon the poet, and his reactions to the America of the early 1850's. The author concludes that the techniques Clough developed for presenting his ideas in poetic form and the concerns that pervaded his thinking make him a precursor of twentieth-century literature. In the last chapter she relates her findings to Clough's three major poems. She includes in an appendix a number of new poems and other material by Clough found in manuscript during her research.
In Robbery Under Law, subtitled 'The Mexican Object Lesson', Waugh presents a profoundly unpeaceful Mexican situation as a cautionary tale in which a once great civilisation - greater than the United States at the turn of the twentieth century - has succumbed, within the space of a single generation, to barbarism.
In this unique collection of short stories composed between 1910-62, Evelyn Waugh's early juvenilia are brought together with later pieces, some of which became the inspirations for his novels. 'Mr Loveday's Little Outing' is a blackly comic tale of a mental asylum and its favourite resident; 'Cruise' sees a hilarious series of letters from a naïve young woman as she travels with her family; 'A House of Gentlefolks' observes a group of elderly eccentric aristocrats and their young heir; and in 'The Sympathetic Passenger' a radio-loathing retiree picks up exactly the wrong hitchhiker. These witty and immaculately crafted stories display the finest writing of a master of satire and comic twists.
Examines commentary written in the margins of the text to show how the pages of the first printed books became the arena for struggled among authors, readers, and cultural authorities. Focuses on four controversies: the printed English Bible, two rivals for court favor, Martin Marprelate's theological pamphlets, and the glossed works of Ben Jonson. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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