Description
Book SynopsisBy examining the ways in which the conservative vision of the world informs certain modes of literary study and has been treated in various works of literature throughout the ages, this book seeks to recover conservatism as a viable, rigorous, intellectually sound method of critical inquiry. While it stops short of promoting political conservatism as an antidote to the dominant progressive strain of today's university, it recognizes literature's transformative power as an artistic reflection of the universal human condition. In this way, it operates against the grain of today''s prevailing approaches to literature, particularly the postmodernist wave that has employed literature as a recorder of injustice rather than as evidence of artistic achievement. Therefore, the agenda is restorative, if not revolutionary, returning literature to its place as the center of a true liberal arts curriculum, one that celebrates human freedom, the unimpeded pursuit of truth, and the preservation of ci
Trade ReviewScholarship on conservative literary traditions, conservative approaches to literary analysis, and conservative writers has become increasingly rare in the Humanities. I welcome with more than ordinary gratitude the wisdom and moral balance of these otherwise silenced voices. -- Ruth Wisse, Harvard University
Table of ContentsForeword: What Graduate School Was For Mark Bauerlein Preface Part 1: The State of the Academy 1)Conservatism, Liberal Education, and the Promise of the Humanities Mark Zunac Part 2: The Conservative Critical Tradition 2)Early Leavis: Who He Was, and What He Is Thomas Jeffers 3)Toward a Conservative Aesthetic: The American New Critics Thomas Stanford III Part 3: Reviving the Canon: Some Reconsiderations 4)Popular Reception of Shakespeare's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice Todd H.J. Pettigrew 5)Carlyle the Wise Barton Swaim 6)Conservatism and the Genteel Tradition: George Santayana and Henry James James Seaton 7)‘Tony madly feudal’: Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and the Conservative Critique of Secular Conservatism D. Marcel DeCoste Part 4: Non-Canonical Texts 8)Private Property and the Anti-Jacobin Defense of Liberty and the Nation Mark Zunac 9)Black and American: George Schuyler’s Battle against Black Separatism Mary Grabar About the Contributors Index
