The Critical Idyll is a socio-literary re-evaluation of Goethe’s idyllic verse epic, Hermann und Dorothea. The revival of traditional German values as markers of national identity against the approaching revolutionary armies of the French in the early 1790s is analysed in the main figure, the archetypal German youth, Hermann. Confronted by the misery of German refugees from the left-bank territories in 1796, Hermann becomes the spokesman for a new sense of German identity. The refugee Dorothea, and her first finance, the German Jacobin who died in Paris, provide a perspective on the themes of German identity and individual freedom at this time. The national feelings Hermann expresses are based on a language and community in the German small town, rather than on earlier territorial or dynastic concepts of the German nation. The traditional literary form of the idyll is reformed through irony and parody into a modern, critical and self-reflexive work in which central themes of post-revolutionary society are foregrounded.
A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones. Throughout most of American history, antielitist sentiment was reserved for attacks against an entrenched aristocracy or rapacious plutocracy, but it has now become a revolt against meritocracy itself, directed against what insurgents see as a ruling class of credentialed elites with degrees from exclusive academic institutions. Catherine Liu reveals that, within the academy and stemming from the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, animosity against expertise has animated much of the Left’s cultural criticism. By unpacking the disciplinary formation and academic ambitions of American cultural studies, Liu uncovers the genealogy of the current antielitism, placing the populism that dominates headlines within a broad historical context. In the process, she emphasizes the relevance of the historical origins of populist revolt against finance capital and its political influence. American Idyll reveals the unlikely alliance between American pragmatism and proponents of the Frankfurt School and argues for the importance of broad frames of historical thinking in encouraging robust academic debate within democratic institutions. In a bold thought experiment that revives and defends Richard Hofstadter’s theories of anti-intellectualism in American life, Liu asks, What if cultural populism had been the consensus politics of the past three decades? American Idyll shows that recent antielitism does nothing to redress the source of its discontent—namely, growing economic inequality and diminishing social mobility. Instead, pseudopopulist rage, in conservative and countercultural forms alike, has been transformed into resentment, content merely to take down allegedly elitist cultural forms without questioning the real political and economic consolidation of powers that has taken place in America during the past thirty years.
*Creating the Countryside* provokes reflection on the artistic, social and political forces that have played an important role in forming successive generations perceptions of this green and pleasant land. The rural idyll occupies a deeply rooted place in the nations psyche Compton Verneys Capability Brown landscaped grounds are themselves an expression of this. *Creating the Countryside* explores how artists have shaped the vision of rural life and landscape, offering a new perspective on the countryside and its expression in contemporary art and society. Works by artists including Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, George Stubbs and Stanley Spencer are joined by pieces from contemporary artists such as Mat Collishaw, Anna Fox, Sigrid Holmwood and Grayson Perry to present you with a broad spectrum of responses to, and interpretations of, this sceptred isle.
A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'; a Victorian self-improvement ethic; or as an aspect of the heroic workers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical culture. The present work contrastingly applies a wide variety of interpretive approaches to this literature. Essays on more familiar topics, such as the 'agrarian idyll' of John Clare, are mixed with entirely new areas in the field like working-class women's 'life-narratives'. This authoritative and comprehensive History explores a wide range of genres such as travel writing, the verse-epistle, the elegy and novels, while covering aspects of Welsh, Scottish, Ulster/Irish culture and transatlantic perspectives.
In this elegant book, premier musicologist Reinhold Brinkmann guides us through Brahms's "Second Symphony," examining musical ideas in all their compositional facets and placing them in the context of major trends in the intellectual history of late nineteenth-century Europe.
