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The career of Matthew Arnold as an eminent poet and the preeminent critic of his generation constitutes a remarkable historical spectacle orchestrated by a host of powerful Victorian cultural institutions.The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnoldinvestigates these constructions by situating Arnold's poetry in a number of contexts that partially shaped it. Such analysis revises our understanding of the formation of the elite (and elitist) male literary-intellectual subject during the 1840s and 1850s, as Arnold attempts self-definition and strives simultaneously to move toward a position of ideological influence upon intellectual institutions that were contested sites of economic, social, and political power in his era.Antony H. Harrisonreopens discussion of selected works by Arnold in order to make visible some of their crucial sociohistorical, intertextual, and political components. Only by doing so can we ultimately view the cultural work of Arnold \"steadily and … whole,\" and in a fashion that actually eschews this mystifying premise of all Arnoldian inquiry which, by the early twentieth century, had become wholly naturalized in the academy as ideology.

Opening the way for a reexamination of Matthew Arnold's unique contributions to ethical criticism, James Walter Caufield emphasizes the central role of philosophical pessimism in Arnold's master tropes of \"culture\" and \"conduct.\" Caufield uses Arnold's ethics as a lens through which to view key literary and cultural movements of the past 150 years, demonstrating that Arnoldian conduct is grounded in a Victorian ethic of \"renouncement,\" a form of altruism that wholly informs both Arnold's poetry and prose and sets him apart from the many nineteenth-century public moralists. Arnold's thought is situated within a cultural and philosophical context that shows the continuing relevance of \"renouncement\" to much contemporary ethical reflection, from the political kenosis of Giorgio Agamben and the pensiero debole of Gianni Vattimo, to the ethical criticism of Wayne C. Booth and Martha Nussbaum. In refocusing attention on Arnold's place within the broad history of critical and social thought, Caufield returns the poet and critic to his proper place as a founding father of modern cultural criticism.

Many of the ideas that appear in Arnold's Preface of 1853 to his collection of poems and in his later essays are suggested in the letters that Arnold wrote to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Analysis of the Preface reveals a poet who found a theoretical basis for poetry (by which he means literature in general) in the dramas of the Greek tragedians, particularly Sophocles: action is stressed as an indispensable ingredient, wholes are preferred to parts, the didactic function of literature is promoted -- in short, the Preface reads like the recipe for a classical tragedy. It is a young poet's attempt to establish criteria for what poetry ought to be. He found the Romantic idiom outworn. Literature was, in Arnold's perception, meant to communicate a message rather than impress by its structure or by formal sophistication. Modern theories of coalescence between content and form were outside the contemporary paradigm. T S Eliot's ambivalent attitude to Arnold -- now reluctantly admiring, now decidedly patronizing -- is puzzling. Eliot never seemed able to liberate himself from the influence of Arnold. What in Arnold's critical oeuvre attracted and at the same time repelled Eliot? That question has led to an in-depth analysis of Arnold as a literary critic. This book begins with an examination of Arnold's letters to Clough, where \"it all started\" and proceeds with a close reading of the 1853 Preface. A look at some of the later literary essays rounds off the picture of Arnold as a literary critic. This work is the result of Reader and Review comments of the author's well received Eliot's Objective Criticism: Tradition or Individual Talent? \"Yet he is in some respects the most satisfactory man of letters of his age.\" -- T S Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

Victorian Fetishism argues that fetishism was central to the development of cultural theory in the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1900, when theories of social evolution reached their peak, European intellectuals identified all \"primitive\" cultures with \"Primitive Fetishism,\" a psychological form of self-projection in which people believe everything in the external world—thunderstorms, trees, stones—is alive. Placing themselves at the opposite extreme of cultural evolution, the Victorians defined culture not by describing what culture was but by describing what it was not, and what it was not was fetishism. In analyses of major works by Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Edward B. Tylor, Peter Melville Logan demonstrates the paradoxical role of fetishism in Victorian cultural theory, namely, how Victorian writers projected their own assumptions about fetishism onto the realm of historical fact, thereby \"fetishizing\" fetishism. The book concludes by examining how fetishism became a sexual perversion as well as its place within current cultural theory.

Through comparative close readings of Matthew Arnold, William Dean Howells, W.B. Yeats and W.E.B. Du Bois, this text questions the notion of 'the West' as it appears in the formulations of postcolonial theory and forces readers to reconsider the meaning of 'culture', 'identity' and 'national literature'.

Drawing on the great wealth of knowledge and experience of education practitioners and theorists, these volumes explore the very important relationship between education and society. These book became standard texts for actual and intending teachers. Drawing upon comparative material from Israel France, and Germany, titles in The Sociology of Education set of the Internation Library of Sociology also discuss the key questions of girls' and special needs education, and the psychology of education.

My argument proceeds in three stages. In the first, I explain how sweetness acquired new meanings in early modern poetics by examining William Scott's Model of Poesy as a retrospective text attuned to its major source, Sidney's Defence of Poesy. Writing twenty years later than Sidney, Scott seeks to tease out the rhetorical and philosophical roots of \"sweet Sidney's\" valuation of the \"sweet.\" Part two of the argument puzzles about why sweetness is the single value key to the defense of poetry that Sidney never undertakes to defend. The tension between Scott's purposeful reading of sweetness and Sidney's sweet sugaring of complex argument creates a premodern site already charged with that intractable conflict between poetry's moralizers and poetry's pleasure-seekers still at play in contemporary affect theorists as different as Martha Nussbaum and Charles Altieri. Part 3 of my argument examines the scandalous sweetness of Stella in Sidney's sonnets, only to rethink what we mean by scandal and how we might understand sweetness as a premodern aesthetic.

While the Hebrew Bible may lack a sustained reflection on the nature of literary art, some biblical poems nevertheless appear to be self-conscious of their own literary production. This article investigates how the texts themselves conceptualize the nature and potential of the aesthetic word. One situation in which self-consciousness of aesthetic production is evident is use of the verb dalet-mem-heh (“to make a likeness”) in Song of Songs, Lamentations, and prophetic poetry. This essay explores how poets self-consciously used poetic language to create verbal images that have the ability to escape rhetorical and theological purposes. These images can evoke surprising, even paradoxical experiences, such as spaces of beauty and consolation in the midst of terror and destruction. These passages, along with other prophetic texts that characterize and critique poetry, reveal that some ancient Israelite poets already recognized that poetry can function not just as mere ornament or illustration but as a creative act that retains a productive power all its own.

This essay argues for the role of instrumental thinking in cultural and literary criticism, practices sometimes thought of as naturally anti-instrumental. Focusing on the work of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, it shows a shared instrumental defense of Christianity but also how, for situational reasons, this defense has made instrumentalism harder to locate within the Anglophone critical tradition. Arnold promoted adherence to the national church on openly civic and functional grounds, though to do so he had to derogate the idea, widely held by British Christians, that the metaphysical truth of Christianity outweighed practical considerations. Eliot, in a career of apologetics that consciously emended Arnold's, offered a similarly effectual sense of Christianity's value but enfolded this valuation into a model of cultural holism that forbade individual acts of if/then calculation, avoiding the appearance of bad faith. Eliot's holism becomes part of Raymond Williams's conception of the agency of the cultural despite Williams's lack of interest in the specifically religious project. In brief, the rhetorical difficulty of instrumentalizing Christianity drives instrumental calculation underground, making it illegible against the larger backdrop of romantic anti-utilitarianism in cultural politics. This essay suggests that, when the object is not belief, instrumental approaches to culture present fewer contradictions than is often assumed and that it may be an opportune moment to reconsider them.

According to Conte, the most demanding form of allusion interrogates the historical values of the reader’s culture, forcing on readers “a consciousness of their immersion in history” (p. 57). Like Charlemagne’s elegiac outcry and Roland’s ceremonial dying, Wiglaf’s lament and the series of communal mourning rites reported by Beowulf’s narrator (pyre, memorial mound, buried treasure, chanting) suggest that words and gestures do not echo emptily but retain a degree of power. [...]the epic reverses the medieval “clerical” contemptus mundi or memento mori lamentations found in poems such as “The Wanderer” (its central figure perhaps another ancestor of Browning’s exiled, wandering Roland), poems that emphasize the transience, even the meaninglessness, of human life.17 In “The Wanderer,” as in “Childe Roland,” what has been lost by time and change cannot be retrieved by elegiac naming, by poetic language, or, indeed, by memory. [...]the absent presence of that ubi sunt trope, with its inherent historical/temporal tensions, underscores, brings into sharper focus, the failure and deracination that afflict Roland. The connection between mourning and inheritance has remained a close one throughout history.” [...]since the time of Moschus’s lament for Bion, “few elegies can be fully read without an appreciation of this frequently combative struggle for inheritance” (English Elegy, p. 37).