Shows the surprising ways T. S. Eliot's work sheds light on—and proves useful to—the contemporary struggle for a freer and more just world.How does literature from the past speak to the present? What can we, as readers committed to combatting oppression, learn from figures whose writing we love but some of whose beliefs we may oppose? Quite a lot, according to Patrick R. Query. To make this case, Query turns to a writer and critic as canonical as he is controversia...

While most critical studies of interwar literary politics have focused on nationalism, Patrick Query makes a case that the idea of Europe intervenes in instances when the individual and the nation negotiate identity. He examines the ways interwar writers use three European ritual forms-verse drama, bullfighting, and Roman Catholic rite-to articulate ideas of European cultural identity. Within the growing discourse of globalization, Query argues, Europe presents a special, though often over...

What distinguishes history as a discipline from other fields of study? That's the animating question of Sarah Maza’s Thinking About History, a general introduction to the field of history that revels in its eclecticism and highlights the inherent tensions and controversies that shape it.Designed for the classroom, Thinking About History is organized around big questions: Whose history do we write, and how does that affect what stories get told and how they are tol...

A stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time from an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author.Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought.A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives...

China Miéville's riveting engagement with the Communist Manifesto offers a lyrical introduction and a spirited defense of the modern world's most influential political document.Few written works can so confidently claim to have shaped the course of history as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Manifesto of the Communist Party. Since first rattling the gates of the ruling order in 1848, this incendiar...

THE TIMES BEST IDEAS BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2024'A splendid book: economical, invigorating and surprising' The Times'He has that gift, both as a podcaster and as a writer, to illuminate abstruse and abstract ideas with human charm' ObserverIn this bold new follow-up to Confronting Leviathan, David Runciman unmasks modern politics and reveals the great men and women of ideas behind...

Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevi...

Many books have sought to introduce the writings of the infamous and influential philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, but Get Over Yourself puts matters the other way round. Rather than simply explaining his thought, it instead asks: what would Nietzsche make of us? What would he think of our 21st-century, digital age? In our time of identity politics, therapy culture, 'safe spaces', religious fundamentalism, virtue-signalling, Twitterstorms, public emoting, 'dumbing-down', digital addiction ...

“Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters.”—Nadine GordimerAcross more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ world...

One of our most brilliant minds offers a sweeping intellectual history that argues for the reclamation of culture’s valueCulture is a defining aspect of what it means to be human. Defining culture and pinpointing its role in our lives is not, however, so straightforward. Terry Eagleton, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics, is uniquely poised to take on the challenge. In this keenly analytical and acerbically funny book, he explores how culture and our...

Terry Eagleton's book, in this vital new series from Blackwell, focuses on discriminating different meanings of culture, as a way of introducing to the general reader the contemporary debates around it.

A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury AmericaIn a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers th...