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Georg Brandes (1842-1927) was one of the leading literary critics in Europe of his time. His Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature (1872-1890) was a foundational text to the field of comparative literature and extolled by Thomas Mann as the “Bible of the young intellectual Europe at the turn of the century.” Georg Brandes eventually developed into a truly global public intellectual, living by his pen and public lectures. On the eve of World War I, he was one of the most sought-after commentators, vigorously opposing all conflicting factions. This book seeks to understand Brandes’ trajectory, to evaluate Brandes’ significance for current discussions of literary criticism and public engagement, and to introduce Brandes to an international audience. It consists of 15 original chapters commissioned from experts in the field.
Peter Abelard and the Mental Architecture of the Paraclete
The Paraclete was founded in 1129. Out of necessity to find a new place to shelter a group of nuns, this female community was created by Peter Abelard (1079–1142) for Heloise of Argenteuil (1090–1164). Varieties of the Self shows how this community was dependent on a network of monasteries, while also representing a formative driving force in the twelfth-century reform, the period of flourishing to which it clearly belonged. The anthropological approach connects different works written by Peter Abelard (hymns, life-rules, letters, biblical commentaries) to views on the female self. What is the perspective on identity, sacrifice, and intentionality within these sources, and how do views on pollution, purity, and sacredness reflect on ethics of body and soul?
Shaftesbury, Akenside, and the Discipline of the Imagination
Eighteenth-Century Stoic Poetics: Shaftesbury, Akenside, and the Discipline of the Imagination offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century poetics of Lord Shaftesbury and Mark Akenside. This book traces the two authors’ debt to Roman Stoic spiritual exercises and early modern conceptions of the care of the self, which informs their view of the poetic imagination as a bundle of techniques designed to manage impressions, cultivate right images in the mind and rectify judgement. Alexandra Bacalu traces the roots of this articulation in early modern writings on the imagination, as well as in Restoration and Augustan debates on wit, exploring the fruitful tension between ideas of imaginative enthusiasm and imaginative regulation that it provokes.
Gambhīravaṃśaja’s Nyāyasūtravivaraṇa—First Adhyāya
The Nyāyasūtravivaraṇa, written in the first centuries of the 2nd millennium CE, provides the most accessible introduction to the core teachings of old Nyāya.
Excerpting from the two earliest and most important treatises of this tradition—the Nyāyabhāṣya and Nyāyavārttika—Gambhīravaṃśaja created a comprehensive yet concise digest.
The present work contains not only a critical edition of the first chapter based on all known textual sources but also a complete documentation of the variants, a comprehensive study of the parallel passages, a detailed discussion of the preparation and processing of the text-critical data, and a detailed documentation of the Grantha Tamil, Telugu and Kannada scripts.
Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, first published in French in 1719, is one of the seminal works of modern aesthetics. Du Bos rejected the seventeenth-century view that works of art are assessed by reason. Instead, he believed, audience members have sentiments in response to artworks. Their sentiments are fainter versions of those they would feel in response to actually seeing what the work of art imitates. Du Bos was influenced by John Locke’s empiricism and, in turn, had a major impact on virtually every major eighteenth-century contributor to philosophy of art, including Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Herder, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Kames, Gerard, and Hume. This is the first modern, annotated and scholarly edition of the Critical Reflections in any language.
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Combining anatomies of textual examples with broader contextual considerations related with the social, political and economic developments of post-Mao China, Xiaoping Wang intends to explore newly emerging social and cultural trends in contemporary China, and find the truth content of Chinese society and culture in the age of global capitalism.
Through in-depth textual analyses covering a variety of media, ranging from fiction, poetry, film to theoretical works as well as cultural phenomena which mirror social and cultural occurrences and reflect the present ideological proclivities of the Chinese society, this study offers timely interpretations of China in the age of globalization, its political inclinations, social fashions and cultural tendencies, and provides thought-provoking messages of China’s socio-economic and political reality.
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In Cultural Criticism in the Netherlands, 1933-40, Jacob Boas offers a broad selection of the newspaper columns of legendary Dutch cultural critic Menno ter Braak. Ter Braak’s columns are noteworthy not only for their distinctive treatment of disparate cultural components ranging from literature to the social sciences, but also for the light they throw on the extent to which politics intruded on the cultural sphere in the years prior to the outbreak of war.
Ter Braak set a standard for literary criticism of surpassing quality. Moreover, a staunch advocate of democracy, the critic joined the battle against fascism, urging fellow intellectuals to rise to the occasion. The ‘conscience of Dutch letters’ killed himself on the eve of the German occupation, May 1940.
The English-German collection Herder on Empathy and Sympathy: Einfühlung und Sympathie im Denken Herders considers the meaning and role of the concepts of empathy and sympathy in Herder’s thought. Herder invokes sympathy in a number of disciplinary domains ranging from metaphysics, biology, anthropology, epistemology, psychology, morality, politics, history, aesthetics to homiletics. While Herder is shown as belonging to a long line of thinkers who view sympathy as a metaphysical principle contributing to the interconnectedness of all parts of nature, he also offers new insights about intra-/inter-species sympathetic communication and distinctively human varieties of sympathy for which he reserves the term “sich einfühlen”. Acknowledging the limits of the natural capacity for “sich einfühlen”, Herder nonetheless calls for its reflective cultivation in various domains.
The Challenge of History
Anna Seghers: The Challenge of History features essays by leading scholars devoted to this most important German writer whose novels and stories have been read by millions worldwide. The volume is intended for teachers and students of literature and for general readers. The contributions address facets of Seghers’s large body of work which is characterized by reflections on political events shaping world history and written in a highly imaginative array of narrative styles. The first section focuses on the author’s famous novel The Seventh Cross. Articles in the next two sections analyze her reactions to crises that marked the twentieth century and her connections to other relevant thinkers of her time. The last section features new translations of Seghers’s works.