Double Agent is a watershed in the recent revival of interest in the role of the public critic and intellectual who writes about culture, politics, and the arts for an intelligent general audience. Offering acute portraits of critics both famous and neglected, Dickstein traces the evolution of cultural criticism over the last century from Matthew Arnold to New Historicism. He examines the development of practical criticism, the rise and fall of literary journalism, and the growth of American Studies, and rereads the work of critics like Arnold, Walter Pater, I.A. Richards, Roland...
Double Agent is a watershed in the recent revival of interest in the role of the public critic and intellectual who writes about culture, pol...
In this powerful book we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. And we discover, with him, the astonishing truth about -packingtown, - the busy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where new world visions perish in a jungle of human suffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the -muckraking- novel, here explores the workingman's lot at the turn of the century: the backbreaking labor, the injustices of -wage-slavery, - the bewildering chaos of urban life. The Jungle, a story so shocking...
In this powerful book we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom, a...
The twenty-five years after the Second World War were a lively and fertile period for the American novel and an era of momentous transformation in American society. Taking his title from the Kafka parable about the leopards who kept racing into the courtyard of the temple, disrupting the sacrifice, until they were made part of the ritual, Morris Dickstein shows how a daring band of outsiders reshaped the American novel and went on to dominate American fiction for the rest of the century.
In fluid prose, offering a social as well as a literary history, Dickstein provides a...
The twenty-five years after the Second World War were a lively and fertile period for the American novel and an era of momentous transformation in ...
In a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a roadway. In the twentieth century this was derided as a naive notion of realism. Instead, modern writers experimented with creative forms of invention and dislocation. Deconstructive theorists went even further, questioning whether literature had any real reference to a world outside its own language, while traditional historians challenged whether novels gave a trustworthy representation of history and society.
In this book, Morris Dickstein...
In a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a roadway. In t...
Lionel Trilling and the Critics provides a comprehensive portrait of Lionel Trilling, perhaps the most influential American cultural critic of the twentieth century. The contributors are a who s who of Anglo-American intellectuals from the 1930s through the 1970s. They include Edmund Wilson, Robert Penn Warren, F. R. Leavis, Leslie Fiedler, R. W. B. Lewis, R. P. Blackmur, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Raymond Williams, Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, William Barrett, Bruno Bettelheim, Gerald Graff, and Cornel West."
Lionel Trilling and the Critics provides a comprehensive portrait of Lionel Trilling, perhaps the most influential American cultural critic of ...
A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic.
Winner of the National Book Award, 1976
World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their...
A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic.
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism--with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth--lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. Since the 1960s, however, pragmatism in many guises has again gained prominence, finding congenial places to flourish within growing intellectual movements. This volume of new essays brings together leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, social thinkers, and literary critics to examine the...
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism--with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent vi...
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism--with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth--lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. Since the 1960s, however, pragmatism in many guises has again gained prominence, finding congenial places to flourish within growing intellectual movements. This volume of new essays brings together leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, social thinkers, and literary critics to examine the...
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism--with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent vi...
A series of introductory essays acquaints readers with the key themes and contexts of Baldwin's work, the culture and politics of his time. Classic and contemporary pieces discuss Baldwin's essays and their cultural and political context. Other essays discuss Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and its themes of regret, recollection and confession, and the themes of nostalgia and sexual desire in Giovanni's Room and "Going to Meet the Man."
A series of introductory essays acquaints readers with the key themes and contexts of Baldwin's work, the culture and politics of his time. Classic an...
The turbulent 1960s, almost from its outset, produced a dizzyingdisplay of cultural images and ideas that were as colorful as the psychedelic T-shirts that became part of its iconography. It was not, however, until Morris Dickstein's landmark Gates of Eden, first published in 1977, that we could fullygrasp the impact of this raucous decade in American history as amomentous cultural epoch in its own right, asmuch as Jazz Age America or Weimar Germany. From Ginsberg and Dylan to Vonnegut and Heller, this lasting work brilliantly re-creates not only the intellectual and political...
The turbulent 1960s, almost from its outset, produced a dizzyingdisplay of cultural images and ideas that were as colorful as the psychedelic T-shi...
