Although we know him as one of the greatest English poets, William Wordsworth might not have become a poet at all without the experience of personal and historical catastrophe in his youth. In "Disowned by Memory," David Bromwich connects the accidents of Wordsworth's life with the originality of his writing, showing how the poet's strong sympathy with the political idealism of the age and with the lives of the outcast and the dispossessed formed the deepest motive of his writings of the 1790s. "This very Wordsworthian combination of apparently low subjects with extraordinary 'high...
Although we know him as one of the greatest English poets, William Wordsworth might not have become a poet at all without the experience of personal a...
"Skeptical Music" collects the essays on poetry that have made David Bromwich one of the most widely admired critics now writing. Both readers familiar with modern poetry and newcomers to poets like Marianne Moore and Hart Crane will relish this collection for its elegance and power of discernment. Each essay stakes a definitive claim for the modernist style and its intent to capture an audience beyond the present moment. The two general essays that frame "Skeptical Music" make Bromwich's aesthetic commitments clear. In "An Art without Importance," published here for the first time,...
"Skeptical Music" collects the essays on poetry that have made David Bromwich one of the most widely admired critics now writing. Both readers familia...
Liberal education has been under siege in recent years. Far-right ideologues in journalism and government have pressed for a uniform curriculum that focuses on the achievements of Western culture. Partisans of the academic left, who hold our culture responsible for the evils of society, have attempted to redress imbalances by fostering multiculturalism in education. In this eloquent and passionate book a distinguished scholar criticizes these positions and calls for a return to the tradition of independent thinking that he contends has been betrayed by both right and left. Under the guise of...
Liberal education has been under siege in recent years. Far-right ideologues in journalism and government have pressed for a uniform curriculum that f...
Essayist, lecturer, and radical pamphleteer, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was the greatest of English critics and a master of the art of prose. This book is a superb appreciation of the man and his works, at once a revaluation of the aesthetics of Romanticism and a sustained intellectual portrait. Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism when it was first published in 1983, it is now reissued with a new preface and bibliography by the author.
"Few literary figures in recent decades have seen their reputations rise as securely as Hazlitt's. Now it will soar....
Essayist, lecturer, and radical pamphleteer, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was the greatest of English critics and a master of the art of prose. This...
Easily the most controversial antislavery novel written in antebellum America, and one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin is often credited with intensifying the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. In his introduction, David Bromwich places Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel in its Victorian contexts and reminds us why it is an enduring work of literary and moral imagination. The John Harvard Library text follows the first American edition, published by John P. Jewett & Company.
Easily the most controversial antislavery novel written in antebellum America, and one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, Uncle T...
Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature.
Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination...
Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural...
David Bromwich's portrait of statesman Edmund Burke (1730-1797) is the first biography to attend to the complexity of Burke's thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. The public and private writings cannot be easily dissociated, nor should they be. For Burke--a thinker, writer, and politician--the principles of politics were merely those of morality enlarged. Bromwich reads Burke's career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be.
This intellectual biography examines the first three decades of...
David Bromwich's portrait of statesman Edmund Burke (1730-1797) is the first biography to attend to the complexity of Burke's thought as it emerges...
Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature.
Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination...
Spanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural...
