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Introduction: What is education for? -- Hewers of wood and drawers of water. Mandeville and Smith -- Polite and British education. Chesterfield and Sheridan -- \"Strangers to refinement\". British education and Sparta, 1740-1790 -- Women's time. Macaulay, Edgeworth, Wollstonecraft.

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology is a lucid and accessible introduction to a major twentieth-century thinker those ideas have influenced fields as diverse as literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, politics and anthropology. Stephen Bygrave explores the content of Burke's vast output of work, focusing especially on his preoccupation with the relation between language, ideology and action. By considering Burke as a reader and writer of narratives and systems, Bygrave examines the inadequacies of earlier readings of Burke and unfolds his thought within current debates in Anglo-American cultural theory. This is an excellent re-evaluation of Burke's thought and valuble introduction to the impressive range of his ideas.

In a short commentary on Hannah Arendt's chapter 'The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man' in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Agamben argues that 'the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come'.4 For Agamben, the figure of the refugee calls into question the universal claims of human rights declarations by 'breaking up' the assumption that the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen includes human subjects who are not citizens. 8The 'standard' view of Arendt that prevailed during this period, argues Seyla Benhabib, was of a 'political philosopher of nostalgia, an anti-modernist for whom the Greek \"polis\" remained the quintessential political experience'.9 In a similar vein, Slavoj Zizek describes a shift in the reception of Arendt's thought in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001): 'Until two decades ago, Leftist radicals dismissed [Arendt] as the perpetrator of the notion of \"totalitarianism\", the key weapon of the West in the Cold War ideological struggle: if, at a Cultural Studies symposium in the 1970s, one was asked innocently, \"Is your line of argumentation not similar to that of Arendt?\", this was a sure sign that one was in deep trouble'.1 \"Benhabib (among others) offers a more nuanced reading of Arendt that challenges the 'standard' reading which both she and Zizek oudine. For Benhabib, it was Arendt's critical engagement with Heidegger and Marx that offered crucial insights into the political implications of uprootedness, statelessness, and homelessness - conditions associated with modernity which also enabled the rise of totalitarianism.11 Crucially, Benhabib suggests that Arendt's thought offers an alternative genealogy of modernity that complicates the prevailing identification of modernity with the 'spread of commodity exchange relations and the growth of a capitalist economy'.12 For Arendt, Benhabib suggests, modernity also brings with it 'new forms of social interaction' and identity politics that underpin modern forms of totalitarianism and racism.13 Arendt's reflections on 'The Jews and Society' in part one of The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, noted that it had 'been one of the most unfortunate facts in the history of the Jewish people that only its enemies, and almost never its friends, understood that the Jewish question was a political one'.14 Recognising this 'unfortunate fact', however, did not become the basis of her own identity politics. [...]in a positive if challenging contestation to the thinkers with whom she engages, Terada's essay argues for a toleration of the very meaninglessness in whose shadow Arendt had feared oblivion.

Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the first collection of essays on poet and public intellectual Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825). By international scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, these new essays survey Barbauld’s writing from early to late: her versatility as a stylist, her poetry, her books for children, her political writing, her performance as editor and reviewer. They explore themes of sociability, materiality, and affect in Barbauld’s writing, and trace her reception and influence. Rooted in enlightenment philosophy and ethics and dissenting religion, Barbauld’s work exerted a huge impact on the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on education and ideas about childhood far into the nineteenth century. William McCarthy’s introduction explores the importance of Barbauld’s work today, and co-editor Olivia Murphy assesses the commentary on Barbauld that followed her rediscovery in the early 1990s. Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the indispensible introduction to Barbauld’s work and current thinking about it.