"This study traces the successive stages of Thackeray's contact with the German world and analyses the discourse he developed as a result. The author is concerned with the fiction and criticism of Thackeray's :Paris Sketch Book"" and the impressions related by the cockney traveller in ""Irish Sketch Book"" and ""Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo"". Thackeray's own pictorial illustrations of his writings and those by Cruikshank, Doyle and Walker, which he supervised and supplemented, are recognized as an integral part of his German discourse. The study is a chronological one, setting Thackeray's construction of ""German"" and ""the Germans"" against the background of his own development and of the social, industrial, cultural and political history of Britain and its continental neighbours."
"Walter Pater, best known as the author of The Renaissance (1873) and as Oscar Wildes tutor and friend, was a leading figure in European aestheticism and British fin-de-siecle culture. Despite this, he has received only limited critical attention, and has tended to be read conservatively. Drawing on Paters unpublished manuscripts, Giles Whiteley challenges this view of Pater as a closeted don who spend the remainder of his life regretting the excesses of his Renaissance. Focusing on Paters reading of the German idealist philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, Whiteley argues that Paters response to both the philosophical and the ideological legacies of idealism was significantly more advanced than has been hitherto thought. Presenting a persuasive new reading of the genre of the imaginary portrait Paters most elusive form of writing the book paints a picture of Walter Pater as a truly revolutionary thinker. Pater, like Nietzsche during the same period, breaks with the dialectic as a method. Anticipating the radical critiques of ideology of post- Hegelians such as Derrida and Deleuze, Pater becomes a radical and transgressive thinker in his own right."
In this fascinating collection of essays Harvard Emeritus Professor Karl S. Guthke examines the ways in which, for European scholars and writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, world-wide geographical exploration led to an exploration of the self. Guthke explains how in the age of Enlightenment and beyond intellectual developments were fuelled by excitement about what Ulrich Im Hof called "the grand opening-up of the wide world”, especially of the interior of the non-European continents. This outward turn was complemented by a fascination with "the world within” as anthropology and ethnology focused on the humanity of the indigenous populations of far-away lands – an interest in human nature that suggested a way for Europeans to understand themselves, encapsulated in Gauguin’s Tahitian rumination "What are we?” The essays in the first half of the book discuss first- or second-hand, physical or mental encounters with the exotic lands and populations beyond the supposed cradle of civilisation. The works of literature and documents of cultural life featured in these essays bear testimony to the crossing not only of geographical, ethnological, and cultural borders but also of borders of a variety of intellectual activities and interests. The second section examines the growing interest in astronomy and the engagement with imagined worlds in the universe, again with a view to understanding homo sapiens, as compared now to the extra-terrestrials that were confidently assumed to exist. The final group of essays focuses on the exploration of the landscape of what was called "the universe within”; featuring, among a variety of other texts, Schiller’s plays The Maid of Orleans and William Tell, these essays observe and analyse what Erich Heller termed "The Artist’s Journey into the Interior.” This collection, which travels from the interior of continents to the interior of the mind, is itself a set of explorations that revel in the discovery of what was half-hidden in language. Written by a scholar of international repute, it is eye-opening reading for all those with an interest in the literary and cultural history of (and since) the Enlightenment.
I ran to the side of the ship. Help, help! Murder! I screamed, and my uncle slowly turned to look at me. I did not see any more. Already strong hands were pulling me away. Then something hit my head; I saw a great flash of fire, and fell to the ground . . .' And so begin David Balfour's adventures. He is kidnapped, taken to sea, and meets many dangers. He also meets a friend, Alan Breck. But Alan is in danger himself, on the run from the English army across the wild Highlands of Scotland . . .
This book consists of a series of essays which concern themselves with the persisting relevance of metaphysical speculation in our time. It delves into Hegel’s politics, the ethics of Confucius and Aristotle, the research of Leibniz, with its astonishing anticipations of modern ideas, Wittgenstein’s reflections on language, the meaning of music and art and a capital instance of a failed enquiry into life and mind from a scientific point of view. In all these instances, the focus is on the autonomous agency of the human being. Metaphysics as a philosophical discipline has long been under fire for its doctrinal presumptions, but never more so than under the hegemony of science. Yet, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, it remains an indispensable tool for thinkers in all areas of research in which the human creature is under the spotlight. That this involves a reversal of competences has not been seriously accepted—predominantly in terms of the gulf between autonomous agency and the mechanistic doxa under which science is compelled to operate. This volume seeks to put the torch on these discrepancies, where presuppositions end and understanding must take over.
Marcy P. Lascano examines the philosophical systems of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway. Cavendish and Conway are both known for their monism, i.e., the view that there is only one kind of substance in the world, which is capable of self-motion and life. Lascano here provides detailed analyses of their respective accounts of monism, substance, self-motion, individuation, and identity over time, as well as causation, perception, and freedom. She thereby shows how their superficially similar views provide importantly different explanations of the workings of the world. Lascano illuminates under-appreciated nuances in Cavendish's and Conway's views, highlighting the important differences between their systems. Examining their views in tandem allows readers to appreciate the originality of their ideas and their responses to seventeenth-century debates. The book's final chapter then explains how Cavendish's metaphysics lays the groundwork for her natural philosophy, while Conway's metaphysics provides the foundation for her theodicy. Drawing on their original writing and engaging with existing scholarship, Lascano presents the first sustained comparison of Cavendish's and Conway's metaphysics revealing the differences between Cavendish's thoroughgoing naturalism and Conway's spiritualism. In turn, she enlarges our view of these thinkers and their unique ways of understanding the world around us.
