The essays in this book criticise the new positivism in education policy, whereby education is systematically reduced to those things that can be measured by so-called 'objective' tests. School curricula have been narrowed with an emphasis on measurable results in the 3 R's and the 'quality' of university departments is now assessed by managerial exercises based on commercial audit practice. As a result, the traditional notion of liberal arts education has been replaced by utilitarian prod...

Who are we and how do we define our inner selves?In his last work, Professor Stephen Prickett presents a literary and cultural exploration of our inner selves – and how we have created and written about them – from the Old Testament to social media.What he finds is that although our secret, inner, sense of self – what we feel makes us distinctively 'us' – seems a natural and permanent part of being human, it is in fact surprisingly new. Whilst confessional religious writing...

The Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization, and also the most difficult to interpret. It has been the vehicle of continual conflict, with every interpretation reflecting passionately-held views that have affected not merely religion, but politics, art, and even science. This unique edition offers an exciting new approach to the most influential of all English biblical texts - the Authorized King James Version, complete with the Apocrypha. Its wide-ranging I...

Romanticism was always culturally diverse. Though English-language anthologies have previously tended to see Romanticism as predominantly British, the term itself actually originated in Germany, where it became the banner of a Europe-wide movement involving the profound intellectual and aesthetic changes which we now associate with modernity. This anthology is the first to place British Romanticism within a comprehensive and multi-lingual European context, showing how ideas and writers int...

First published in 1981. This book aims to show Romanticism as a response to certain questions – in literature, art, religion, philosophy and politics – that were being asked increasingly towards the end of the eighteenth century. The essays focus on growth and change (in society and the individual), nature, feeling and reason, and subjectivism – examining how these questions arose, why they were felt to be important and the kinds of answers that, consciously or unconsciously, the Romantic...