Product Description
Matthew Arnold has long been recognized as the greatest of Victorian critics. In Communications with the Future, Donald Stone demonstrates Arnold's enormous range, vitality, and continuing relevance. Demonstrating the similarities between Arnold's position and that of subsequent intellectual leaders from Nietzsche to Foucault, Stone vividly establishes that Arnold remains valid now, not only for his emphasis on broad-minded thinking, but also in his enduring impact on the leaders of our own time. Appealing to the belief that we should adopt a dialogical frame of mind, Arnold stands tall today as a harsh critic of narrow-mindedness and overspecialization.
Each chapter of Communications with the Future places Arnold in dialogue with an important modern figure or group of figures. Arnold's relationship with America, particularly with America's finest literary critic, Henry James, is surveyed, as is Arnold's relations with French critics from Sainte-Beuve and Ernest Renan to Michel Foucault. Subsequent chapters pair Arnold with Nietzsche, as pungent critics of society and impassioned advocates of "culture," with Hans-Georg Gadamer, as mutual defenders of the humanities, and with the American pragmatists--William James, Richard Rorty, John Dewey--as architects of "creative democracy."
Stone argues that Arnold has wrongly been labeled an elitist and the proponent of a rigid canon, when in fact he is dedicated to openness, democracy, and multiculturalism. This book should write finis to that misreading, and will further illuminate our concepts of what it means to live as members of a democratic culture.
". . . full of fresh insights, in a readable style, [Communications with the Future] altogether amounts to an eloquent plea for a sound and valuable criticism, against various regressive, dogmatic, narrow schools currently flourishing." --Ruth apRoberts, University of California, Riverside
Donald D. Stone is Professor of English, Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His books include The Romantic Impulse in Modern Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Lives (coedited with John Maynard and Laurence Lockridge).
... Read more

Product Description
The late Professor Basil Willey's important and influential inquiry into the history of religious and moral ideas in the nineteenth century has become (since its first appearance in 1949) a seminal study for all students of English literature and the history of ideas. Instead of surveying a complex nexus of ideas from a single vantage point, the author examines a shifting succession of beliefs. Religion and ethics are both the clue to those beliefs and an index of their fluctuations, and Professor Willey offers a lucid exposition and impartial evaluation of the issues raging at the heart of Victorian life: progress, original sin, enlightened self-interest and the moral imperative. Individual chapters are devoted to Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Newman, Carlyle, Bentham, Mill, Comte, George Eliot and Matthew Arnold. Professor Willey's particular achievement is to have clarified and reanimated these controversies so as to show their continuing relevance. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
Variations in the Literary Iambic Pentameter from Sidney and Spenser to Matthew Arnold. ... Read more

Product Description
Discusses Arnold's debt to a number of German writers, Goethe in particular.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Sweetness and Light
This book is a nicely written (sweetness) and insightful (light) exploration of, well, just what the title says, Matthew Arnold and Christianity. Debunking the charge by T.S. Eliot and others that Arnold was a spiritual dilettante, Livingston convincingly demonstrates the high seriousness of Arnold's spiritual quest and religious writings. In doing so he carefully explores Arnold's own distinctive and highly individual religiosity while contextualizing it relative to the Liberal Protestantism and the Catholic Modernism of Arnold's day--all while also touching on its relationship to certain later theological movements of the twentieth century, many of which do indeed seem to find in it a forerunner. Scholarly and accessible in the best senses. ... Read more

Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more

Product Description

The University Press of Virginia edition of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive and assiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When complete in six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearly five times the number in G.W.E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895. The letters, at once meaty and delightful, appear with a consecutiveness rare in such editions, and they contain a great deal of new information, both personal (sometimes intimate) and professional. Two new diaries are included, a handful of letters to Matthew Arnold, and many of his own that will appear in their entirety here for the first time. Renowned as a poet and critic, Arnold will be celebrated now as a letter writer. Nowhere else is Arnold's appreciation of life and literature so extravagantly evident as in his correspondence. His letters amplify the dark vision of his own verse, as well as the moral background of his criticism. As Cecil Lang writes, the letters "may well be the finest portrait of an age and of a person, representing the main movements of mind and of events of nearly half a century and at the same time revealing the intimate life of the participant-observer, in any collection of letters in the nineteenth century, possibly in existence."

Volume 1 begins with an account of the Arnold children by their father, headmaster of Rugby School. The letters show Arnold as a precocious schoolboy, doted on and remonstrated by his extended family; as a foppish Oxonian; as a young man enjoying the pleasures of Paris and working at a perfect and undemanding job; then as a new husband in an imperfect, too-demanding job; as Professor of Poetry at Oxford; and finally as an emergent European critic. As Cecil Lang writes in his engaging and spacious introduction, "Arnold learned to live with a boring, demanding, underpaid, unrewarding occupation largely because -- questing intellectual, husband and father, school inspector, clubbable man-about-town and cosmopolite-about-Europe and America, hunter, fisherman, skater, voracious reader -- he lived to learn."

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more