Throughout his oeuvre Goethe invokes the writers and thinkers of the Enlightenment: Voltaire and Goldsmith, Sterne and Bayle, Beccaria and Franklin. And he does not merely reference them: their ideas make up the salt of his most acclaimed works. Like Hume before him, Goethe takes up the topic of suicide, but in a best-selling novel, Werther; the beating heart of Faust I is the fate of a woman who commits infanticide, a burning social issue of his age; in an article for a popular journal Goethe takes up the cause of Kant and Penn, who wrote treatises on how to establish peace in Europe. In...

The conversation, sometimes heated, about the influence of Christianity on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien has a long history. What has been lacking is a forum for a civilized discussion about the topic, as well as a chronological overview of the major arguments and themes that have engaged scholars about the impact of Christianity on Tolkien's oeuvre, with particular reference to The Lord of the Rings. The Ring and the Cross addresses these two needs through an articulate and authoritative analyses of Tolkien's Roman Catholicism and the role it plays in understanding his writings. The...

This volume attempts to throw fresh light on two areas of Benjamin Franklin's intellectual world, namely: his self-fashioning and his political thought. It is an odd thing that for all of Franklin's voluminous writings--a fantastically well-documented correspondence over many years, scientific treatises that made his name amongst the brightest minds of Europe, newspaper articles, satires, and of course his signature on the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution--and yet scholars debate how to get at his political thought, indeed, if he had any political philosophy at all. It...

Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence positions Carlyle as an ideal representative figure through which to study that complex interplay between past and present most commonly referred to as influence.