The Liberal Imagination
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The Liberal Imagination
''The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society'' (1950) is a collection of sixteen essays by American literary critic Lionel Trilling, published by Viking in 1950. The book was edited by Pascal Covici, who had worked with Trilling when he edited and introduced Viking's ''Portable Matthew Arnold'' in 1949. With the exception of the preface, which was written specifically for the publication of the book, all the essays included in ''The Liberal Imagination'' were individually published in the decade before the book's publication in literary and critical journals, such as ''The Partisan Review'', ''The Kenyon Review'', ''The Nation'', and ''The American Quarterly''. The essays represent Trilling's written work and critical thoughts of the 1940s. In the essays, Trilling explores the theme of what he calls "liberalism" by looking closely at the relationship between literature, culture, mind, and the imagination. He offers passionate critiques against literary ideas of reali ...
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Lionel Trilling
Lionel Mordecai Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling (née Rubin), whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the ''Partisan Review''. Personal and academic life Lionel Mordecai Trilling was born in Queens, New York, the son of Fannie (née Cohen), who was from London, and David Trilling, a tailor from Bialystok in Poland. His family was Jewish. In 1921, he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, and, at age 16, entered Columbia University, thus beginning a lifelong association with the university. He joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote for the ''Morningside'' literary journal. In 1925, he graduated from Columbia College, and, in 1926, earned a Master of Arts degree ...
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Norman Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz (; born January 16, 1930) is an American magazine editor, writer, and conservative political commentator, who identifies his views as " paleo-neoconservative".An Interview with Norman Podhoretz
April 16, 2019, Claremont
He is a writer for '''' magazine, and previously served as the publication's editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995.


Early life and education

The son of Julius and Helen (Woliner) Podhoretz, Jewish immigrants from the Central European region of Galicia (t ...
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Intimations Of Immortality
''Intimations of Immortality'', Op. 29, an ode for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, is one of the best-known works by English composer Gerald Finzi. It is a setting of nine of the eleven stanzas (all but the seventh and eighth) of William Wordsworth's " Ode: Intimations of Immortality", cast as a single continuous movement of 45 minutes duration. Finzi began composing the work in the late 1930s, but did not complete it until 1950, just before it was performed on 5 September at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral, with Eric Greene as soloist and Herbert Sumsion conducting. Music critics and historians have pointed out there are obvious stylistic similarities between portions of ''Intimations'' and William Walton's 1931 cantata ''Belshazzar's Feast Belshazzar's feast, or the story of the writing on the wall (chapter 5 in the Book of Daniel), tells how Belshazzar holds a great feast and drinks from the vessels that had been looted in the destruction of the Solomon's ...
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Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work. Kipling's works of fiction include the ''Jungle Book'' duology ('' The Jungle Book'', 1894; '' The Second Jungle Book'', 1895), ''Kim'' (1901), the '' Just So Stories'' (1902) and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include " Mandalay" (1890), " Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), " The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If—" (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.Rutherford, Andrew (1987). General Preface to the Editions of Rudyard Kipling, in "Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies", by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".Rutherford, Andrew ( ...
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American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction. Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought to a head by the victory in the 1860 U.S. presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion into the west. An initial seven southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and, in 1861, forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized U.S. forts and other federal assets within their borders. Led by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, ...
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Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it flows generally south for to the Mississippi River Delta in the Gulf of Mexico. With its many tributaries, the Mississippi's watershed drains all or parts of 32 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces between the Rocky and Appalachian mountains. The main stem is entirely within the United States; the total drainage basin is , of which only about one percent is in Canada. The Mississippi ranks as the thirteenth-largest river by discharge in the world. The river either borders or passes through the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Native Americans have lived along the Mississippi River and its tributaries for thousands of years. Most were hunter-ga ...
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Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry "Huck" Finn is a fictional character created by Mark Twain who first appeared in the book ''The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'' (1876) and is the protagonist and narrator of its sequel, ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' (1884). He is 12 or 13 years old during the former and a year older ("thirteen or fourteen or along there", Chapter 17) at the time of the latter. Huck also narrates ''Tom Sawyer Abroad'' and ''Tom Sawyer, Detective'', two shorter sequels to the first two books. Characterization Huckleberry "Huck" Finn is the son of the town's vagrancy (people), vagrant drunkard, "Pap" Finn. Sleeping on doorsteps when the weather is fair, in empty hogsheads during storms, and living off of what he gets from others, Huck lives the life of a destitute vagabond. The author metaphorically names him "the juvenile Outcast (person), pariah of the village" and describes Huck as "idle, and lawless, and vulgar, and bad", qualities for which he was admired by all the other children i ...
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Partisan Review
''Partisan Review'' (''PR'') was a small-circulation quarterly "little magazine" dealing with literature, politics, and cultural commentary published in New York City. The magazine was launched in 1934 by the Communist Party USA–affiliated John Reed Club of New York and was initially part of the Communist political orbit. Growing disaffection on the part of ''PR''s primary editors began to make itself felt, and the magazine abruptly suspended publication in the fall of 1936. When the magazine reemerged late in 1937, it came with additional editors and new writers who advanced a political line deeply critical of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the magazine had evolved towards a moderate social democratic and staunchly anti-Stalinist perspective and was generally supportive of American foreign policy. ''Partisan Review'' received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1950s and 1960s as part of the agency's efforts to shape intellectual op ...
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The Princess Casamassima
''The Princess Casamassima'' is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in ''The Atlantic Monthly'' in 1885 and 1886 and then as a book in 1886. It is the story of an intelligent but confused young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in radical politics and a terrorist assassination plot. The book is unusual in the Jamesian canon for dealing with such a violent political subject. But it is often paired with another novel published by James in the same year, ''The Bostonians'', which is also concerned with political issues, though in a much less tragic manner. Plot Amanda Pynsent, an impoverished seamstress, has adopted Hyacinth Robinson, the illegitimate son of her old friend Florentine Vivier, a French woman of less than sterling repute, and an English lord. Florentine had stabbed her lover to death several years ago, and Pinnie (as Miss Pynsent is nicknamed) takes Hyacinth to see her as she lies dying at Millbank prison. Hyacinth eventually ...
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Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer. At the time, he moved to Chicago and was eventually married three additional times. His most enduring work is the short-story sequence ''Winesburg, Ohio,'' which launched his career. Throughout the 1920s, Anderson published several short story collections, novels, memoirs, books of essays, and a book of poetry. Though his books sold reasonably well, '' Dark Laughter'' (1925), a novel inspired by Anderson's time in New Orleans during the 1920s, was his only bestseller. Early life Sherwood Berton Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, at 142 S. Lafayette Street in Camden, Ohio, a farming town with a population of ar ...
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Nihilism
Nihilism (; ) is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. The term was popularized by Ivan Turgenev, and more specifically by his character Bazarov in the novel '' Fathers and Sons''. There have been different nihilist positions, including that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless. Pratt, Alan.Nihilism" ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. . Scholars of nihilism may regard it as merely a label that has been applied to various separate philosophies, or as a distinct historical concept arising out of nominalism, skepticism, and philosophical pessimism, as well as possibly out of Christianity itself. Contemporary understanding of the idea stems largely from the Nietzschean 'crisis of nihilism', from which d ...
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Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (; August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include ''Sister Carrie'' (1900) and ''An American Tragedy'' (1925). Early life Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to John Paul Dreiser and Sarah Maria (née Schanab).Finding aid to thTheodore Dreiser papersat thUniversity of Pennsylvania Libraries/ref> John Dreiser was a German immigrant from Mayen in the Rhine Province of Prussia, and Sarah was from the Mennonite farming community near Dayton, Ohio. Her family disowned her for converting to Roman Catholicism in order to marry John Dreiser. Theodore was the twelfth of thirteen children (the ninth of the ten surviving). Paul Dresser (1857–1906) ...
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