[PDF] Lionel Trilling eBook

Author : Lionel Trilling
Publisher : New York Review of Books
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 13,50 MB
Release : 2012-07-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1590175514

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The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

Author : Lionel TRILLING
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 40,95 MB
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0674044460

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“Now and then,” writes Lionel Trilling, “it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

Author : Lionel Trilling
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 753 pages
File Size : 15,50 MB
Release : 2001-10-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1466832142

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A landmark reissue of a great teacher's finest work Lionel Trilling was, during his lifetime, generally acknowledged to be one of the finest essayists in the English language, the heir of Hazlitt and the peer of Orwell. Since his death in 1974, his work has been discussed and hotly debated, yet today, when writers and critics claim to be "for" or "against" his interpretations, they can hardly be well acquainted with them, for his work has been largely out of print for years. With this re-publication of Trilling's finest essays, Leon Wieseltier offers readers of many new generations a rich overview of Trilling's achievement. The essays collected here include justly celebrated masterpieces--on Mansfield Park and on "Why We Read Jane Austen"; on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Isaac Babel; on Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost; on "Art and Neurosis"; and the famous Preface to Trilling's book The Liberal Imagination. This exhilarating work has much to teach readers who may have been encouraged to adopt simpler systems of meaning, or were taught to exchange the ideals of reason and individuality for those of enthusiasm and the false romance of group identity. Trilling's remarkable essays show a critic who was philosophically motivated and textually responsible, alive to history but not in thrall to it, exercised by art but not worshipful of it, consecrated to ideas but suspicious of theory.

Author : Diana Trilling
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
Page : 472 pages
File Size : 36,9 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :

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A uniquely revealing account of the coming-of-age of a remarkable literary couple: Lionel Trilling, the renowned professor of English at Columbia University and one of America's preeminent literary critics, and Diana Trilling, an outstanding critic of culture and politics. Photos.

Author : Adam Kirsch
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 49,20 MB
Release : 2011-10-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 030017828X

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Lionel Trilling, regarded at the time of his death in 1975 as America's preeminent literary critic, is today often seen as a relic of a vanished era. His was an age when literary criticism and ideas seemed to matter profoundly in the intellectual life of the country. In this eloquent book, Adam Kirsch shows that Trilling, far from being obsolete, is essential to understanding our current crisis of literary confidence--and to overcoming it.By reading Trilling primarily as a writer and thinker, Kirsch demonstrates how Trilling's original and moving work continues to provide an inspiring example of a mind creating itself through its encounters with texts. "Why Trilling Matters" introduces all of Trilling's major writings and situates him in the intellectual landscape of his century, from Communism in the 1930s to neoconservatism in the 1970s. But Kirsch goes deeper, addressing today's concerns about the decline of literature, reading, and even the book itself, and finds that Trilling has more to teach us now than ever before. As Kirsch writes, "Trilling's essays are not exactly literary criticism" but, like all literature, "ends in themselves."

Author : Edward Alexander
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 139 pages
File Size : 21,5 MB
Release : 2011-12-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1412815460

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This pioneering effort links history and personality by pairing intellectual friends, most notably Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, but also Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell, George Eliot and Emanuel Deutsch, Theodore Roethke and Robert Heilman. Chronologically the essays range from the early 1830s, when Carlyle and Mill discovered each other, to 1975, when Lionel Trilling died. The essay that gives this volume its title is also the most ambitious. Alexander examines Trilling and Howe in relation to one another and to Jewish quandaries, Henry James, politics and fiction, antisemitic writers, literary radicals, 1960s insurrectionists, the state of Israel, the nature of friendship itself. The chapter on the friendships (and ex-friendships) of Carlyle and Mill, Lawrence and Russell, views their stories against the background of the modern conflict between reason and feeling, positivism and imagination. Though some relationships began in adversity, they developed into friendships. This happened with Roethke and Heilman, and with Eliot and Deutsch. As a young woman, Eliot disparaged Jews as candidates for "extermination," but her friendship with the Talmudic scholar Deutsch changed her into one of the major Judeophiles of the Victorian period. The quartet of Carlyle and Mill, Lawrence and Russell shows how quickly-formed literary friendships, especially those based on hunger for disciples, can dissolve into ex-friendships. This volume offers new perspectives on leading literary figures and their relationship, and shows how friendship influences art.

Author : Wystan Hugh Auden
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 48,19 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Book clubs
ISBN : 0743202627

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A collection of 45 columns and essays by the three eminent writers, originally written for the bulletin of the Readers' Subscription Book Club.

Author : Daniel T. O'Hara
Publisher : Univ of Wisconsin Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 14,15 MB
Release : 1988
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780299113148

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Daniel T. O'Hara reads the career of Trilling as a single, completely conmprehensive work of self-fashioning. The intention of such work, says O'Hara, from the beginning and throughout Trilling's intelectual life, was to create a self that, when confronted with the great achievement of another mind, was capable of imaginative sympathy and not solely resentful critique. In order to reach that goal, however, Trilling had to adopt on e of the conventional masks available to the intellectual in modern culture and adapt it to his needs and to those of his "liberal" time.