How did literary aestheticism emerge in Victorian Britain, with its competing models of religious doubt and visions of secularisation? For Lyons, the aestheticism developed and progressively revised by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and Walter Pater (1839-1894) illuminates the contradictory impulses of modern secularism: on the one hand, a desire to cast itself as a form of neutrality or disinterestedness; on the other, a desire to affirm 'this world' as the place of human flourish...

One of Slate’s 10 Best Books of the YearAnthony Gottlieb’s landmark The Dream of Reason and its sequel challenge Bertrand Russell’s classic as the definitive history of Western philosophy.Western philosophy is now two and a half millennia old, but much of it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150 years. In his landmark survey of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of ...

A brilliant brief account of romanticism and its influence from one of the most important philosophers and intellectual historians of the twentieth centuryIn The Roots of Romanticism, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures are a bravura intellectual performance. Isaiah Berlin surveys the many...

How to live in a supposedly faithless world threatened by religious fundamentalism? Terry Eagleton, formidable thinker and renowned cultural critic, investigates in this thought-provoking book the contradictions, difficulties, and significance of the modern search for a replacement for God. Engaging with a phenomenally wide range of ideas, issues, and thinkers from the Enlightenment to today, Eagleton discusses the state of religion before and after 9/11, the ironies surrounding Western ca...

Humanism built Western civilisation as we know it today. Its achievements include the liberation of the individual, democracy, universal rights, and widespread prosperity and comfort. Its ambassadors are the heroes of modern culture: Erasmus, Holbein, Shakespeare, Velázquez, Descartes, Kant, and Freud.Those who sought to contain humanism’s pride within a frame of higher truth — Luther, Calvin, Poussin, Kierkegaard — could barely interrupt its torrential progress. Those who sought t...

A career-spanning collection of thought-provoking analyses from the renowned literary critic.Sir Frank Kermode has been writing peerless literary criticism for more than a half-century. Pieces of My Mind includes his own choice of his major essays since 1958, beginning with his extraordinary study of "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev" and ending with a marvelous consideration of Shakespeare's Othello and Verdi-Boito's Otello. Important es...

Sir Frank Kermode is acknowledged as one of the greatest critics of our time, renowned for the wit humanity and good sense of his writing. Pleasing Myself brings together the very best of his shorter pieces, on topics ranging from Donne and Yeats to modern art and money.

Allegory is a vast subject, and its knotty history is daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory developed in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystical religion, and hermeneutics. Onc...

Indispensable to an understanding of Medieval and Renaissance texts and a topic of controversy for the Romantic poets, allegory remains a site for debate and controversy in the twenty-first-century.In this useful guide, Jeremy Tambling:presents a concise history of allegory, providing numerous examples from Medieval forms to the present dayconsiders the relationship between allegory and symbolismanalyses the use of allegory in modernist d...

A History of English Literature: Traversing the Centuries provides a comprehensive outline of the course of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. In its fourteen chapters, the book covers all major literary periods with inclusive analyses of the political, social and intellectual developments which inevitably contribute to and influence literature in both overt and subtle ways. The survey includes all important literary figures and their significant literary works...

Image and Imagination presents some of C.S. Lewis's finest literary criticism and religious exposition. This selection gathers together forty book reviews—never before reprinted—as well as four major essays which have been unavailable for many decades, and a fifth essay, “Image and Imagination,” published for the first time. The essays and reviews substantiate Lewis's reputation as an eloquent and authoritative critic across a wide range of literature, and as a keen judge of conte...

The clash between atheism and religion has become the defining battle of the 21st century.Books on and about atheism retain high profile and popularity, and atheist movements on both sides of the Atlantic capture headlines with high-profile campaigns and adverts. However, very little has been written on the history of atheism, and this book fills that conspicuous gap.Instead of treating atheism just as a philosophical or scientific idea about the non-existe...