Hypocrisy Unmasked
Hypocrisy Unmasked

Author: Ronald C. Naso

Publisher: Jason Aronson

Published: 2010-03-18

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0765706792

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Hypocrisy Unmasked explores the motives, meanings, and mechanisms of hypocrisy, challenging two principal psychoanalytic assumptions: First, that hypocrisy expresses deviant, uncontrollable impulses or follows exclusively from superego weakness; and second, that it can be understood solely in terms of intrapsychic factors without reference to the influences of the field. Ronald C. Naso argues that each of these assumptions devolve into criticisms rather than explanations and demonstrates that hypocrisy represents a compromise among intrapsychic, interpersonal, situational, and cultural/linguistic forces in an individual life. Hypocrisy Unmasked accords a healthy respect to the hypocrite's existentiality, including variables like opportunity and chance, and focuses on situations where the hypocrite's desires differ from those of others and on the moral principles that count in decision-making rather than how they are subsequently rationalized. Ultimately, hypocrisy exposes the ineradicable moral ambiguity of the human condition and the irreconcilability of desires and obligations.

The Making of an American Thinking Class
The Making of an American Thinking Class

Author: Darren Staloff

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0195149823

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This pathbreaking study offers a radical new interpretation of the political, religious, and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts. More than simply a theologically inspired Biblical commonwealth, the church state of the Bay Colony was a seventeenth-century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological cells.

The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661
The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661

Author: Carla Gardina Pestana

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2004-12-06

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780674015029

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Between 1640 and 1660, England, Scotland, and Ireland faced civil war, invasion, religious radicalism, parliamentary rule, and the restoration of the monarchy. Carla Gardina Pestana offers a sweeping history that systematically connects these cataclysmic events and the development of the infant plantations from Newfoundland to Surinam. By 1660, the English Atlantic emerged as religiously polarized, economically interconnected, socially exploitative, and ideologically anxious about its liberties. War increased both the proportion of unfree laborers and ethnic diversity in the settlements. Neglected by London, the colonies quickly developed trade networks, especially from seafaring New England, and entered the slave trade. Barbadian planters in particular moved decisively toward slavery as their premier labor system, leading the way toward its adoption elsewhere. When by the 1650s the governing authorities tried to impose their vision of an integrated empire, the colonists claimed the rights of "freeborn English men," making a bid for liberties that had enormous implications for the rise in both involuntary servitude and slavery. Changes at home politicized religion in the Atlantic world and introduced witchcraft prosecutions. Pestana presents a compelling case for rethinking our assumptions about empire and colonialism and offers an invaluable look at the creation of the English Atlantic world.

Returning to Shakespeare
Returning to Shakespeare

Author: Brian Vickers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 100035038X

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Returning to Shakespeare addresses two broad areas of Shakespeare criticism: the unity of form and meaning, and the history of the plays’ reception. Originally published in 1989, the collection represents the best of Brian Vickers’ work from the previous fifteen years, in a revised and expanded form. The first part of the book focuses on the connection between a work’s structural or formal properties and our experience of it. A new study of the Sonnets shows how personal relationships are literally embodied in personal pronouns. An essay on Shakespeare’s hypocrites (Richard III, Iago, Macbeth) analyses the uncomfortable intimacy established between them and the audience by means of soliloquies and asides. Another traces the interplay between politics and the family in Coriolanus, two forms of pressure which combine to push the hero outside society. In the second part Professor Vickers examines some key episodes in the history of Shakespeare criticism. One essay reviews the persistence of drastically altered adaptations of Shakespeare on the London stage from the 1690s to the 1830s, due to the conservatism of both theatre managers and audience. Another reconstructs the debate over Hamlet’s character in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in which the Romantic image of a hero lacking control of his faculties emerged for the first time. This is an important collection by an outstanding Shakespeare critic which will interest specialists and general readers alike.

One Small Candle
One Small Candle

Author: Francis J. Bremer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-07-30

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0197510051

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Four hundred years ago, a group of men and women who had challenged the religious establishment of early seventeenth-century England and struggled as refugees in the Netherlands risked everything to build a new community in America. The story of those who journeyed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower has been retold many times, but the faith and religious practices of these settlers has frequently been neglected or misunderstood. In One Small Candle, Francis J. Bremer focuses on the role of religion in the settlement of the Plymouth Colony and how those values influenced political, intellectual, and cultural aspects of New England life a hundred and fifty years before the American Revolution. He traces the Puritans' persecution in early seventeenth-century England for challenging the established national church and the difficulties they faced as refugees in the Netherlands in the 1610s. As they planted a colony in America, this group of puritan congregationalists was driven by the belief that ordinary men and women should play the deciding role in governing church affairs. Their commitment to lay empowerment and participatory democracy was reflected in congregational church covenants and inspired the earliest political forms of the region, including the Mayflower Compact and local New England town meetings. Their rejection of individual greed and focus on community, Bremer argues, defined the culture of English colonization in early North America. A timely narrative of the people who founded the Plymouth Colony, One Small Candle casts new light on the role of religion in the shaping of the United States.