The Moment of "Scrutiny"
The Moment of

Author: Francis Mulhern

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1789606853

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Few thinkers have had more impact on English-speaking culture in the twentieth century than the late F.R. Leavis (1895-1978). Paradoxically, his literary-critical studies and the cultural ideas associated with them have become pervasive influences, whilst losing none of their power of provocation. Yet amidst the extremes of admiration and hostility that his name attracts-in academic circles and beyond, on Left and Right alike-little serious attention has been given to what was his most audacious and significant venture: the journal, Scrutiny, whose chief editor he was for twenty years, until its closure in 1953. The specific history of this fascinating cultural enterprise is now studied for the first time in The Moment of 'Scrutiny'. Beginning with an analysis of Scrutiny's emergence in the complex historical conditions of inter-war England, Francis Mulhern goes on to recount the work of the journal. Elucidating the logic of of the project that it served, he demonstrates its coherence of purpose, while at the same time tracing the successive mutations that its discourse underwent in the changing politico-cultural conjunctures of its lifetime. A final chapter situates Scrutiny comparatively in the context of early-twentieth-century European thought, considers its specific function in the cultural history of mid-century England and the enigmas of its last years and after-life, and moves finally to an assessment of its significance today.

Figures of Catastrophe
Figures of Catastrophe

Author: Francis Mulhern

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1784781932

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A bold new vision of the modern English novel The leading critic Francis Mulhern uncovers a hidden history in the fiction of the past century, identifying a central new genre: the condition of culture novel. Reading across and against the grain of received patterns of literary association, tracing a line from Hardy and Forster, through Woolf, Waugh and Bowen, to Barstow, Fowles, Rendell, Naipaul, Amis, Kureishi and Smith, he elucidates the recurring topics and narrative logics of the genre, showing how culture emerges as a special ground of social conflict, above all between classes. The narrative evaluations of culture’s ends—the aspirations and the destinies of those whose lives are the subject of these novels—grow steadily darker over time, and the writing itself grows more introverted. A concluding discussion elicits the characteristics of the English condition of culture novel, in an international setting, and closes in, finally, on the central conundrum of the genre: its uncanny reprise, in its own plane, of the historical arc of the modern labour movement in Britain, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century through its post-war heyday to the seemingly inexorable decline of recent decades.

Threat of Dissent
Threat of Dissent

Author: Julia Rose Kraut

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0674246179

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In this first comprehensive overview of the intersection of immigration law and the First Amendment, a lawyer and historian traces ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States from the Alien Friends Act of 1798 to the evolving policies of the Trump administration. Beginning with the Alien Friends Act of 1798, the United States passed laws in the name of national security to bar or expel foreigners based on their beliefs and associations—although these laws sometimes conflict with First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and association or contradict America’s self-image as a nation of immigrants. The government has continually used ideological exclusions and deportations of noncitizens to suppress dissent and radicalism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the War on Anarchy to the Cold War to the War on Terror. In Threat of Dissent—the first social, political, and legal history of ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States—Julia Rose Kraut delves into the intricacies of major court decisions and legislation without losing sight of the people involved. We follow the cases of immigrants and foreign-born visitors, including activists, scholars, and artists such as Emma Goldman, Ernest Mandel, Carlos Fuentes, Charlie Chaplin, and John Lennon. Kraut also highlights lawyers, including Clarence Darrow and Carol Weiss King, as well as organizations, like the ACLU and PEN America, who challenged the constitutionality of ideological exclusions and deportations under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court, however, frequently interpreted restrictions under immigration law and upheld the government’s authority. By reminding us of the legal vulnerability foreigners face on the basis of their beliefs, expressions, and associations, Kraut calls our attention to the ways that ideological exclusion and deportation reflect fears of subversion and serve as tools of political repression in the United States.

Culture/Metaculture
Culture/Metaculture

Author: Francis Mulhern

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-01-04

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1134852223

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Culture/Metaculture is a stimulating introduction to the meanings of 'culture' in contemporary Western society. This essential survey examines: * culture as an antidote to 'mass' modernity, in the work of Thomas Mann, Julien Benda, José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim and F. R. Leavis * changing views of the term in the work of Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot and Richard Hoggart * post-war theories of 'popular' culture and the rise of Cultural Studies, paying particular attention to the key figures of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall * theories of 'metaculture', or the ways in which culture, however defined, speaks of itself. Francis Mulhern's interdisciplinary approach allows him to draw out the fascinating links between key political issues and the changing definitions of culture. The result is an unrivalled introduction to a concept at the heart of contemporary critical thought.

Common Writing
Common Writing

Author: Stefan Collini

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0198758960

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In a series of penetrating and attractively readable essays, Stefan Collini explores aspects of the literary and intellectual culture of Britain from the early twentieth century to the present. Common Writing focuses chiefly on writers, critics, historians, and journalists who occupied wider public roles as cultural commentators or intellectuals, as well as on the periodicals and other genres through which they attempted to reach such audiences. Among the figures discussed are T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, J.B. Priestley, C.S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, Nikolaus Pevsner, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Ignatieff. The essays explore the variety of such figures' writings - something that can get overlooked or forgotten when they are treated exclusively in terms of their contribution to one established or professional category such as 'novelist' or 'historian' - while capturing their distinctive writing voices and those indirect or implicit ways in which they position or reveal themselves in relation to specific readerships, disputes, and traditions. These essays engage with recent biographies, collections of letters, and new editions of classic works, thereby making some of the fruits of recent scholarly research available to a wider audience. Collini has been acclaimed as one of the most brilliant essayists of our time, and this collection shows him at his subtle, perceptive, and trenchant best. Common Writing will appeal to (and delight) readers interested in literature, history, and contemporary cultural debate.

'Essenced to Language'
'Essenced to Language'

Author: Nayef Al-Joulan

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9783039107285

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Rosenberg was more than just a war poet. A general failure to take this into consideration has contributed to the belated recognition of the distinctions of his work. A working-class London Jew, he schooled himself, long before the Great War, to respond to issues of class, culture, art and poetry; a combination of dependency and self-sufficiency which sustains his mature work, and which gave him a sense of himself as an Anglo-Jewish poet. To illuminate Rosenberg, Nayef Al-Joulan considers the conditions of the Jewish community in the East End of London at the turn of the century and examines the writer's attitudes to the Zionism in vogue. He also investigates striking echoes of Freudian psychology in Rosenberg's work. Tracing Rosenberg's working-class literary heritage, Al-Joulan underlines a modern Jewish insight that has parallels with Marx and Freud and therefore uncovers the role class and race played in the critical marginalising of Rosenberg. The book concludes by examining Rosenberg's cognitive ekphrasis, his idea of language as a vehicle for mental essence, a perception rooted into the painter's mind.

Teaching the Media
Teaching the Media

Author: Len Masterman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1134955049

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An invaluable guide both for specialists in media and communication studies and all teachers who wish to use newspapers and TV in their teaching.

Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review Vol. 5 1936-37: Volume 5, 1936-37
Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review Vol. 5 1936-37: Volume 5, 1936-37

Author: F. R. Leavis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1963-01-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0521062586

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Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.

Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review vol. 5 1936-37
Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review vol. 5 1936-37

Author: F. R. Leavis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-07-10

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780521067737

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Scrutiny was first issued quarterly from Cambridge between 1932 and 1953, the principal editor throughout being Dr Leavis. It is now recognized as a formative influence on English intellectual and cultural life worthy to rank with the great reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This reissue is of the 1963 combined set, including a final volume containing an important Retrospect by Dr Leavis and a substantial analytical index. Scrutiny offers an almost complete critical history of English literature from Chaucer to the mid-twentieth century. Medieval literature, Shakespeare, the seventeenth-century poets, Pope, Dryden, Johnson, the great romantics, the Victorians, and nearly all the important modern writers are seriously examined. Many of the articles have become classics, and resulted in revisions of previously accepted views. An important feature of Scrutiny, still of great interest, is the book review section, where many of the important books of the time, and some of the pretentious ones too, were reviewed as they appeared.