This book offers detailed readings of relevant works by Blake, Shelley and Keats, to bring together what is loosely termed as Hermetic tradition, British Romantic poetry and responses to the present crises regarding our life on the planet, including those linked to the notion of posthumanism. This conjunction of forces, so to speak, points beyond the boundaries erected by general sociological complacency and the acceptance of humankind as the centre of existence on Earth, to affirm the value of the non-human world and the possibilities inherent in an awareness of its subtler manifestations. Although the idea of spiritual agency might stretch the bounds of credulity, for centuries the inspired imagination has been considered daemonic; that is, it brings to artists and poets (and certain scientists, indeed) a sense of heightened consciousness, seemingly from beyond the self. Whatever causality may be at play here, it is clear that instances of an exalted outlook on life exist in abundance in the poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats. The present book explores them and their implications.
Although the century which followed Andrew Marvell's death remembered him primarily as a politician and a pamphleteer, this gifted poet is responsible for some of the most brilliant lyric exploration of his time. World Enough and Time is an extensive biography written by Nicholas Murray, a biographer whose literary scholarship and political astuteness matches that of his subject.
This book is about the things which could unite, rather than divide, poets during the English Civil Wars: friendship, patronage relations, literary admiration, and anti-clericalism. The central figure is Andrew Marvell, renowned for his 'ambivalent' allegiance in the late 1640s. Little is known about Marvell's associations in this period, when many of his best-known lyrics were composed. The London literary circle which formed in 1647 under the patronage of the wealthy royalist Thomas Stanley included 'Cavalier' friends of Marvell such as Richard Lovelace but also John Hall, a Parliamentarian propagandist inspired by reading Milton. Marvell is placed in the context of Stanley's impressive circle of friends and their efforts to develop English lyric capability in the absence of traditional court patronage. By recovering the cultural values that were shared by Marvell and the like-minded men with whom he moved in the literary circles of post-war London, we are more likely to find the reasons for their decisions about political allegiance. By focusing on a circle of friends and associates we can also get a sense of how they communicated with and influenced one another through their verse. There are innovative readings of Milton's sonnets and Lovelace's lyric verse, while new light is shed on the origins and audience not only of Marvell's early political poems, including the 'Horatian Ode', but lyrics such as 'To His Coy Mistress'.
The English Radical Imagination addresses current critical assumptions about the nature of radical thought and expression during the English Revolution. Through a combination of biographical and literary interpretation, it revises the representation of radical writers in this period asignorant and uneducated 'tub preachers'. This representation has become a critical orthodoxy since Christopher Hill's seminal study, The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Despite the reservations of so-called 'revisionist' historians about the misleading implications of Hill's work, culturalhistorians and literary critics have continued to view radical texts as authentic artefacts of a form of early modern popular culture. This book challenges the divide between 'elite' and 'popular' culture in the seventeenth century. While research has revealed that the rank and file of the more organized radical movements was composed of the lower 'middling sort' of people who had little or no access to the elite intellectualculture of the period, some of the most important and most discussed radical writers had been to university in the 1620s and 1630s. Chapters 1-2 investigate how critics - especially those sympathetic to the radicals - have tended to repeat hostile contemporary stereotypes of the ideologists andpublicists of radicalism as 'illiterate Mechanick persons'. The failure to recognize the elite cultural background of these writers has resulted in a failure to acknowledge the range of their intellectual and rhetorical resources and, consequently, in a misrepresentation of the sophistication ofboth their ideas and their writing. Chapters 3-5 are case studies of some of the most important and innovative radical writers. They show how these writers use their experience of an orthodox humanist education for the purposes of satire and ridicule and how they interpret texts associated with orthodox ideologies and culturalpractices to produce heterodox arguments. Radical prose of the English Revolution thus emerges as a more complex literary phenomenon than has hitherto been supposed, lending substance to recent claims for its admission to the traditional literary canon.
Though Abraham Lincoln was not a political philosopher per se, in word and in deed he did grapple with many of the most pressing and timeless questions in politics. What is the moral basis of popular sovereignty? What are the proper limits on the will of the majority? When and why should we revere the law? What are we to do when the letter of the law is at odds with what we believe justice requires? How is our devotion to a particular nation related to our commitment to universal ideals? What is the best way to protect the right to liberty for all people? The contributors to this volume, a methodologically and ideologically diverse group of scholars, examine Lincoln's responses to these and other ultimate questions in politics. The result is a fascinating portrait of not only Abraham Lincoln but also the promises and paradoxes of liberal democracy. The basic liberal democratic idea is that individual liberty is best secured by a democratic political order that treats all citizens as equals before the law and is governed by the law, with its limits on how the state may treat its citizens and on how citizens may treat one another. Though wonderfully coherent in theory, these ideas prove problematic in real-world politics. The authors of this volume approach Lincoln as the embodiment of this paradox--"naturally antislavery" yet unflinchingly committed to defending proslavery laws; defender of the common man but troubled by the excesses of democracy; devoted to the idea of equal natural rights yet unable to imagine a harmonoius, interracial democracy. Considering Lincoln as he attempted to work out the meaning and coherence of the liberal democratic project in practice, these authors craft a profile of the 16th president's political thought from a variety of perspectives and through multiple lenses. Together their essays create the first fully-dimensional portrait of Abraham Lincoln as a political actor, expressing, addressing, and reframing the perennial questions of liberal democracy for his time and our own.
In My Double Life 1 Nicholas Hagger told of his four years’ service and double life as an undercover British intelligence agent during the Cold War (there revealed for the first time). Lost in a dark wood like Dante following his encounters with Gaddafi’s Libya and the African liberation movements, he found Reality on a ‘Mystic Way’ of loss, purgation and illumination, perceived the universe as a unity and had 16 experiences of the metaphysical Light. In My Double Life 2 he continues the story. He received new powers, coped with fresh ordeals, acquired three schools, renovated a historic house, and had 76 further experiences of the metaphysical Light. He founded a new philosophy of Universalism and new approaches to contemporary history, international statecraft and world literature. He produced nearly 1,500 poems, over 300 classical odes, five verse plays, two poetic epics, over a thousand short stories – and 40 books that include innovative literary, historical and philosophical works. His vision of Universalism in seven disciplines is like a rainbow with seven bands overarching seven hills. He produced nearly 1,500 poems, over 300 classical odes, five verse plays, two poetic epics, over a thousand short stories – and 40 books that include innovative literary, historical and philosophical works. His vision of Universalism in seven disciplines is like a rainbow with seven bands overarching seven hills.
There is endless talk about the need for an urban renaissance; can it happen in the real world? In this broad, challenging and highly engaging book, Nicholas Schoon argues that the foremost priority for regeneration is to make neighbourhoods and cities places where people with choices choose to live. The author surveys the last two centuries of metropolitan growth and decay, analyzes the successes and failures of recent changes in urban policy and proposes a wide range of radical measures to make the renaissance a reality. Comprehensively researched, The Chosen City is a wake up call for everyone interested and involved in urban regeneration - degree students and academics, planning and housing professionals, architects, surveyors, developers and politicians. The text is illustrated with powerful black and white images from a leading national newspaper photographer.
Arguing that commitments by certain dissenting Protestants to the right of private judgment in matters of Biblical interpretation helped promote religious liberty and religious disestablishment in the early modern West, this text describes a continuous strand of this religious thought - as well as the thinkers who spread it.
Nicholas Hagger's literary, philosophical, historical and political writings are innovatory. He has set out a new approach to literature that combines Romantic and Classical outlooks in a substantial literary oeuvre of 2,000 poems including over 300 classical odes, two poetic epics, five verse plays, three masques, two travelogues and 1,200 stories. He has created a new philosophy of Universalism that focuses on the unity of the universe and humankind and the interconnectedness of all disciplines, and challenges modern philosophy. He has presented an original historical view of the rise and fall of civilisations, and proposed - and detailed - a limited democratic World State with the power to abolish war and solve all the world's problems. Selected Letters draws together those of his letters (written over 60 years) that aid the interpretation and elucidation of his works. Many of his correspondents are well-known figures within literature, philosophy, history and international politics, and Hagger is in the footsteps of Alexander Pope in editing his own letters, which are in the tradition of Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, T.E. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and Ted Hughes (one of his correspondents). They throw light on all aspects of Hagger's vast output, and are required reading for all interested in following the growth of his Universalism, his literary development and his innovatory approach to universal truth. NICHOLAS HAGGER is a poet, man of letters, cultural historian and philosopher. He has lectured at universities in Iraq, Libya and Japan, where he was a Professor of English Literature. He has written 54 books. These include an immense literary offering, most recently King Charles the Wise and Visions of England (both also published by O-Books), and innovatory works within history, philosophy and international politics and statecraft. His archive of papers and manuscripts is held as a Special Collection in the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex. In 2016 he was awarded the Gusi Peace Prize for Literature, and in 2019 the BRICS silver medal for ‘Vision for Future'.
Scholars have often drawn attention to William Blake's unusual sensitivity to his social context. In this book Nicholas Williams situates Blake's thought historically by showing how through the decades of a long and productive career Blake consistently responded to the ideas, writing, and art of contemporaries. Williams presents detailed readings of several of Blake's major poems alongside Rousseau's Emile, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Paine's Rights of Man, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Robert Owen's Utopian Experiments. In so doing, he offers revealing new insights into key Blake texts and draws attention to their inclusion of notions of social determinism, theories of ideology-critique, and Utopian traditions. Williams argues that if we are truly to understand ideology as it relates to Blake, we must understand the practical situation in which the ideological Blake found himself. His study is a revealing commentary on the work of one of our most challenging poets.
World renowned archeologist, Stone Wallace, gets a peculiar phone call that causes him to drop everything and head to the Yucatan Peninsula. Events are now in play to bring forth a truth that has been hidden for thousands of years. Time is running out as the eclipse of 2012 approaches. The truth is waiting that will unveil the clouds from mankind's eyes.
Johnson rose from obscure origins to become a major literary figure of the eighteenth century. Through a detailed survey of his major works and political journalism, Hudson constructs a complex picture of Johnson as a moralist forced to accept the realistic nature of politics during an era of revolutionary transition.
A nuanced discussion of the connections between philosophy, theology, and science, written by a scholar who is also a values-oriented Christian. Churchich believes--unlike naturalistic theorists and biological evolutionists -- that nature offers a very limited picture of reality, and that our origin and destiny are one in the realm of God.
William Blake was ignored in his own time. Now, however, his Songs of Innocence and Experience and 'prophetic books' are widely admired and studied. The second edition of this successful introductory text: - Leads the reader into the Songs and 'prophetic books' via detailed analysis of individual poems and extracts, and now features additional insightful analyses - Provides useful sections on 'Methods of Analysis' and 'Suggested Work' to aid independent study - Offers expanded historical and cultural context, and an extended sample of critical views that includes discussion of the work of recent critics - Provides up-to-date suggestions for further reading William Blake: The Poems is ideal for students who are encountering the work of this major English poet for the first time. Nicholas Marsh encourages you to enjoy and explore the power and beauty of Blake's poems for yourself.
A truly international, authoritative A–Z guide to five centuries of propaganda, in both wartime and peacetime, which covers key moments, techniques, concepts, and some of the most influential propagandists in history. This fascinating survey provides a comprehensive introduction to propaganda, its changing nature, its practitioners, and its impact on the past five centuries of world history. Written by leading experts, it covers the masters of the art from Joseph Goebbels to Mohandas Gandhi and examines enormously influential works of persuasion such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, techniques such as films and posters, and key concepts like black propaganda and brainwashing. Case studies reveal the role of mass persuasion during the Reformation, and wars throughout history. Regional studies cover propaganda superpowers, such as Russia, China, and the United States, as well as little-known propaganda campaigns in Southeast Asia, Ireland, and Scandinavia. The book traces the evolution of propaganda from the era of printed handbills to computer fakery, and profiles such brilliant practitioners of the art as Third Reich film director Leni Riefenstahl and 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose works helped to bring the notorious Boss Tweed to justice.
In The Amoeba in the Room, Nicholas Money explores the extraordinary breadth of the microbial world and the vast swathes of biological diversity that can be detected only using molecular methods. Although biologists have achieved a remarkable level of understanding about the way multicellular organisms operate, Money shows that most people continue to ignore the fact that most of life isn't classified as either plant or animal. Significant discoveries about the composition of the biosphere are making it clear that the sciences have failed to comprehend the full spectrum of life on earth, which is far more diverse than previously imagined. Money's engaging work considers this diversity in all its forms, exploring environments from the backyard pond to the ocean floor to the "mobile ecosystem" of our own bodies. A revitalized vision of life emerges from Money's lively narrative of the lowly, one in which we are challenged to reconsider our existence in proper relationship to the single-celled protists, bacteria, and viruses that constitute most of life on earth. Proposing a radical reformulation of biology education and research in the life sciences, The Amoeba in the Room is a compelling romp through the least visible and yet most prodigiously magnificent aspects of life on earth."--Publisher information.
Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The fifth edition has been revised throughout and includes four new chapters – ‘Feelings’, ‘Wounds’, ‘Body’ and ‘Love’ – to incorporate exciting recent developments in literary studies. In addition to further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.
The Traditions and Influences that Have Shaped the Works of Writers and Thinkers in All Civilisations, Including Nicholas Hagger's 60 Universalist Works
The Traditions and Influences that Have Shaped the Works of Writers and Thinkers in All Civilisations, Including Nicholas Hagger's 60 Universalist Works
All writers and thinkers, and their works, are in a tradition that preceded them. In The Tree of Tradition, Nicholas Hagger sets out a way for all writers and thinkers to be more aware of the traditions and influences that have shaped their works in all subjects and disciplines in all civilisations, using short personal reflections on how influences shaped his own works as an example. Each discipline has metaphysical and secular traditions, and Hagger's A New Philosophy of Literature set out the fundamental theme of world literature as a perennial conflict between a Romantic individual quest for Reality, the One, and a classical condemnation of social follies and vices. Hagger's 60 Universalist works are innovatory in seeing the ultimate unity of the universe, of all disciplines and of humankind, and in reconciling Romanticism and Classicism within a unity he calls Baroque. A Universalist writer is influenced by many sub-traditions, and Hagger particularises the traditions and sub-traditions that have inspired or influenced his works in seven disciplines (mysticism, literature, philosophy and the sciences, history, comparative religion, international politics and statecraft, and world culture) and in the seven branches of literature in which he has written his works (poems and poetic epics, verse plays and masques, short stories, diaries, autobiographies, letters and his statement of the fundamental unity of world literature), which he symbolises in a stag's two seven-branched antlers. This is an inspirational book that throws light on the traditions and influences behind all works in all disciplines and civilisations, and the 109 traditions and 84 influences behind Hagger's Universalist works.
Reflections on the figure of veering form the basis for a new theory of literature. Exploring images of swerving, loss of control, digressing and deviating, Veering provides new critical perspectives on all major literary genres: the novel, poetry, drama, the short story and the essay, as well as 'creative writing'. Royle works with insights from Lewis Carroll, Freud, Adorno, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Deleuze, Cixous and Derrida. With wit and irony he investigates 'veering' in the writings of Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Melville, Hardy, Proust, Lawrence, Bowen, J.H. Prynne and many others. Contrary to a widespread sense that literature has become increasingly irrelevant to our culture and everyday life, Royle brilliantly traces a strange but compelling 'literary turn'.
“I defy anybody—Keynesian, Hayekian, or uncommitted—to read [Wapshott’s] work and not learn something new.”—John Cassidy, The New Yorker As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.
A Financial Times Best Economics Book of 2021 From the author of Keynes Hayek, the next great duel in the history of economics. In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed “monetarism” and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy. In Samuelson Friedman, author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles. Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time, famously remarking "I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treatises—if I can write its economics textbooks." His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States. Like Friedrich Hayek before him, Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom, that yoked free markets and libertarian politics in a potent argument that remains a lodestar for economic conservatives today. In Wapshott’s nimble hands, Samuelson and Friedman’s decades-long argument over how—or whether—to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and "stagflation," it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.
In The New Philosophy of Universalism Nicholas Hagger outlined a new philosophy that restates the order within the universe, the oneness of humankind and an infinite Reality perceived as Light; and its applications in many disciplines, including literature. In this work of literary Universalism, which carries forward the thinking in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and other essays, Hagger traces the fundamental theme of world literature, which has alternating metaphysical and secular aspects: a quest for Reality and immortality; and condemnation of social vices in relation to an implied virtue. Since classical times these two antithetical traditions have periodically been synthesised by Universalists. Hagger sets out the world Universalist literary tradition: the writers who from ancient times have based their work on the fundamental Universalist theme. These can be found in the Graeco-Roman world, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in the Baroque Age, in the Neoclassical, Romantic Victorian and Modernist periods, and in the modern time. He demonstrates that the Universalist sensibility is a synthesis of the metaphysical and secular traditions, and a combination of the Romantic inspired imagination (the inner faculty by which Romantic poets approached the Light) and the Neoclassical imitative approach to literature which emphasizes social order and proportion, a combination found in the Baroque time of the Metaphysical poets, and in Victorian and Modernist literature. Universalists express their cross-disciplinary sensibility in literary epic, as did Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton, and in a number of genres within literature – and in history and philosophy. Universalist historians claim that every civilisation is nourished by a metaphysical vision that is expressed in its art, and when it declines secular, materialist writings lose contact with its central vision. As Universalist literary works restate the order within the universe, reveal metaphysical Being and restore the vision of Reality, Hagger excitingly argues that the Universalist sensibility renews Western civilisation’s health. Literary Universalism is a movement that revives the metaphysical outlook and combines it with the secular, materialistic approach to literature that has predominated in recent times. It can carry out a revolution in thought and culture and offer a new direction in contemporary literature. This work conveys Universalism’s impact on literature, and should be read by all who have concerns about the sickness and decline of contemporary European/Western culture.
This volume offers a wide range of sample passages from literature written in Latin in the British Isles during the period from about 1500 to 1800. It includes a general introduction to and bibliography to the Latin literature of these centuries, as well as Latin texts with English translations, introductions and notes. These texts present a rich panorama of the different literary genres, styles and themes flourishing at the time, illustrating the role of Latin texts in the development of literary genres, the diversity of authors writing in Latin in early modern Britain, and the importance of Latin in contemporary political, religious and scientific debates. The collection, which includes both texts by well-known authors (such as John Milton, Thomas More and George Buchanan) and previously unpublished items, can be used as a point of entry for students at school and university level, but will also be of interest to specialists in a number of academic disciplines.
This study focuses on how Frankenstein works: how the story is told and why it is so rich and gripping. Part I uses carefully selected short extracts for close textual analysis, while Part II examines Shelley's life, the historical and literary contexts of the novel, and offers a sample of key criticism.
Florida's antebellum architecture reflects the state's singular history and the realities faced and enjoyed by her early citizens. Threats from Native Americans dictated that the homes of early frontiersmen incorporate in their design defensive features, and many felt the need to locate within small towns. Many planters held close family and business ties with the older, more established South, which encouraged elaborate homes that could easily fit into the plantation architecture of South Carolina, Georgia, or Mississippi. Influences from the state's two ruling countries-Spain and England-also gave way to unique design. Florida's Antebellum Homes features images of buildings that incorporate various combinations of these design features. In addition, some of the public structures shown here reflect the emerging senses of personal affluence, civic pride, and political development. Unfortunately, some of these buildings no longer exist; they fell prey to natural catastrophes, unbridled expansion, and the relentless march of Florida's exacting climate. Many, however, remain in pristine condition and invite the public to appreciate them today, much as earlier Floridians reveled in their stateliness.
This is a new account of the intellectual, literary and political development of one the central poets in the English canon. Author Nicholas McDowell follows John Milton more or less from his birth in 1608 and his education to his emergence as a polemical prose writer in the 1640s, concluding at the moment when Milton turned his pen to defending the execution of Charles I in 1649 in the closing years of the English Civil War, though several years before the onset of the poet's blindness and the composition of Paradise Lost. As the author makes explicit, this is not a book about the writing of Milton's great biblical epic; rather, it is a book about the formation of the mind that eventually would create this epic, though only after that same mind, of course, justified the killing of a king. Central to the book is Milton's evolving understanding of the ways in which 'tyranny'-defined initially in ecclesiastical and clerical terms but which grows to encompass political organization-retards the intellectual and cultural progress of a nation. McDowell demonstrates how this understanding was shaped not only by Milton's historical experience of the political turbulence of mid seventeenth-century Britain, but also by the interaction between that experience and his intellectual life. This, the author says, was Milton's period of intensive and almost entirely orthodox reading in history and religion, and it was then that he came to see any clerical encroachment upon civil authority as tyranny. His intellectual pursuits, in tandem with wider events, led him to turn to explicitly political prose writing in the defence of regicide at the beginning of 1649. This biography of the first half of the poet's life shows us how John Milton the young poet, scholar, humanist, and universalist became John Milton the puritan, republican and polemicist"--
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