George Washington: A Life in Books

George Washington: A Life in Books

Author: Kevin J. Hayes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-04-03

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0190456698

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When it comes to the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton are generally considered the great minds of early America. George Washington, instead, is toasted with accolades regarding his solid common sense and strength in battle. Indeed, John Adams once snobbishly dismissed him as "too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation." Yet Adams, as well as the majority of the men who knew Washington in his life, were unaware of his singular devotion to self-improvement. Based on a comprehensive amount of research at the Library of Congress, the collections at Mount Vernon, and rare book archives scattered across the country, Kevin J. Hayes corrects this misconception and reconstructs in vivid detail the active intellectual life that has gone largely unnoticed in conventional narratives of Washington. Despite being a lifelong reader, Washington felt an acute sense of embarrassment about his relative lack of formal education and cultural sophistication, and in this sparkling literary biography, Hayes illustrates just how tirelessly Washington worked to improve. Beginning with the primers, forgotten periodicals, conduct books, and classic eighteenth-century novels such as Tom Jones that shaped Washington's early life, Hayes studies Washington's letters and journals, charting the many ways the books of his upbringing affected decisions before and during the Revolutionary War. The final section of the book covers the voluminous reading that occurred during Washington's presidency and his retirement at Mount Vernon. Throughout, Hayes examines Washington's writing as well as his reading, from The Journal of Major George Washington through his Farewell Address. The sheer breadth of titles under review here allow readers to glimpse Washington's views on foreign policy, economics, the law, art, slavery, marriage, and religion-and how those views shaped the young nation.. Ultimately, this sharply written biography offers a fresh perspective on America's Father, uncovering the ideas that shaped his intellectual journey and, subsequently, the development of America.


The Animal Claim

The Animal Claim

Author: Tobias Menely

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-04-06

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 022623939X

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Today, we tend to react skeptically to claims about our access to the animal mind, the political importance of compassion, and the natural origins of community. However, such claims were widespread in the Restoration and eighteenth century, the long Age of Sensibility. Even so famous a skeptic as the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote that animals undoubtedly feel, think, love, hate, will, and even reason. In "The Animal Claim," Tobias Menely shows that for Hume and other thinkers of his time, the acknowledgment of creaturely voice was crucial to their theories of community. Looking primarily to the long eighteenth century in Britain, Menely argues that sympathyincluding sympathy with animalscame to be regarded as a foundational resource of social relation, and that it fell to poets, in particular, to represent creaturely voice in the public sphere. Menely connects this development to new ideas of political community in Britain and the emergence of a viable discourse of animal rights in the age of legislative reform. The result is an original contribution to both animal studies and eighteenth-century scholarship."


The Delighted States

The Delighted States

Author: Adam Thirlwell

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2008-05-27

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 9780374137229

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"The Delighted States" follows a carousel of literary influence that shows how translation and emigration lead to a new and true history of the novel. This book is a provocation, a box of tricks, a bedside travel book; it is also a work of startling intelligence and originality from a young writer.


The Culture of Sensibility

The Culture of Sensibility

Author: G. J. Barker-Benfield

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 554

ISBN-13: 0226037142

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During the eighteenth century, "sensibility," which once denoted merely the receptivity of the senses, came to mean a particular kind of acute and well-developed consciousness invested with spiritual and moral values and largely identified with women. How this change occurred and what it meant for society is the subject of G.J. Barker-Benfield's argument in favor of a "culture" of sensibility, in addition to the more familiar "cult." Barker-Benfield's expansive account traces the development of sensibility as a defining concept in literature, religion, politics, economics, education, domestic life, and the social world. He demonstrates that the "cult of sensibility" was at the heart of the culture of middle-class women that emerged in eighteenth-century Britain. The essence of this culture, Barker-Benfield reveals, was its articulation of women's consciousness in a world being transformed by the rise of consumerism that preceded the industrial revolution. The new commercial capitalism, while fostering the development of sensibility in men, helped many women to assert their own wishes for more power in the home and for pleasure in "the world" beyond. Barker-Benfield documents the emergence of the culture of sensibility from struggles over self-definition within individuals and, above all, between men and women as increasingly self-conscious groups. He discusses many writers, from Rochester through Hannah More, but pays particular attention to Mary Wollstonecraft as the century's most articulate analyst of the feminized culture of sensibility. Barker-Benfield's book shows how the cultivation of sensibility, while laying foundations for humanitarian reforms generally had as its primary concern the improvement of men's treatment of women. In the eighteenth-century identification of women with "virtue in distress" the author finds the roots of feminism, to the extent that it has expressed women's common sense of their victimization by men. Drawing on literature, philosophical psychology, social and economic thought, and a richly developed cultural background, The Culture of Sensibility offers an innovative and compelling way to understand the transformation of British culture in the eighteenth century.