Consisting of some 572 letters with annotations, with another 460 summarized by date, this tenth volume in a projected set of 12 offers all of James's known correspondence during a pivotal period in his development as a philosopher. The introduction notes that among the torrent of philosophical works that James (1842-1910) wrote during a time of poor health were The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and articles on what he called "radical empiricism." Skrupskelis (emeritus, philosophy, U. of South Carolina) and Berkeley (editorial coordinator, The Works of William James) include a chronology of the letters, many to novelist brother, Henry James, and fellow philosophers including Dewey, Schiller, and Bergson; a biographical register; textual record of major revisions; and James family tree. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Carlyles at Home and Abroad explores the extensive influence of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle in England and Scotland, Europe, and the United States. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, such as aesthetics, history, biography, literature, travel writing, feminism and race. The result is a volume that offers a fresh assessment of the couple as national and international figures.
This book examines the interdisciplinary foundations of pragmatism from a literary perspective, tracing the characters and settings that populate the narratives of pragmatist thought in Henry James’s work. Cultivated during a postwar era of industrial change and economic growth, pragmatism emerged in the late nineteenth century as the new shape of American intellectual identity. Charles Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. were close friends who founded different branches of pragmatism while writing on a vast array of topics. Skeptical about philosophy, William James’s brother, Henry, stood at the margins of this group, crafting his own version of pragmatism through his novels and short stories. Gregory Phipps argues that James’s fiction weaves together the varied depictions of individuality, society, experience, and truth found in the works of Peirce, Holmes, and William James. By doing so, James brings to narrative life a defining moment in American intellectual and material history.
This collection of 216 letters offers an accessible, single-volume distillation of the exchange between celebrated brothers William and Henry James. Spanning more than fifty years, their correspondence presents a lively account of the persons, places, and events that affected the Euro-American world from 1861 until the death of William James in August 1910. An engaging introduction by John J. McDermott suggests the significance of the Selected Letters for the study of the entire family.
Joan Richardson provides a fascinating and compelling account of the emergence of the quintessential American philosophy: pragmatism. She demonstrates pragmatism's engagement with various branches of the natural sciences and traces the development of Jamesian pragmatism from the late nineteenth century through modernism, following its pointings into the present. Richardson combines strands from America's religious experience with scientific information to offer interpretations that break new ground in literary and cultural history. This book exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary approaches to producing literary criticism. In a series of highly original readings of Edwards, Emerson, William and Henry James, Stevens, and Stein, A Natural History of Pragmatism tracks the interplay of religious motive, scientific speculation, and literature in shaping an American aesthetic. Wide-ranging and bold, this groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of American literature.
In his historic 1919 dissent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes named, and thus catalyzed the creation of, the marketplace of ideas. This conceptual space has, ever since, been used to give shape to American constitutional notions of the freedom of expression. It has also eluded clear definition, as jurists and scholars have contested its meaning for more than a century. In The Structure of Ideas, Jared Schroeder takes on the task of mapping the various iterations of the marketplace, from its early foundations in Enlightenment beliefs in universal truths and rational actors, to its increasingly expansive parameters for protecting expression in the arenas of commercial, corporate, and online speech. Schroeder contends that in today's information landscape, marked by the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence, the marketplace is failing to provide a space where truths succeed and falsity fails. AI and networked technologies have thoroughly overpowered all traditional pictures of the marketplace up to now. Schroeder proposes various theoretical interventions that would revise the marketplace for the current moment, and concludes by describing a new space built around algorithms, AI, and virtual communication.
The intellectual relationship between Henry James and his father, who was a philosopher and theologian, proved to be an influential resource for the novelist. Andrew Taylor explores how James's writing responds to James Senior's epistemological, thematic and narrative concerns, and relocates these concerns in a more secularised and cosmopolitan cultural milieu. Taylor examines the nature of both men's engagement with autobiographical strategies, issues of gender reform, and the language of religion. He argues for a reading of Henry James that is informed by an awareness of paternal inheritance. Taylor's study reveals the complex and at times antagonistic dialogue between the elder James and his peers, particularly Emerson and Whitman, in the vanguard of mid nineteenth-century American Romanticism. Through close readings of a wide range of novels and texts, he demonstrates how this dialogue anticipates James's own theories of fiction and selfhood.