Download or read book Historical Imagination written by David J. Staley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-27 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical Imagination examines the threshold between what historians consider to be proper, imagination-free history and the malpractice of excessive imagination, asking where the boundary between the two sits and the limits of permitted imagination for the historian. We use "imagination" to refer to a mental skill that encompasses two different tasks: the reconstruction of previously experienced parts of the world and the creation of new objects and experiences with no direct connection to the actual world. In history, imagination means using the mind's eye to picture both the actual and inactual at the same time. All historical works employ at least some creative imagination, but an excess is considered "too much". Under what circumstances are historians permitted to cross this boundary into creative imagination and how far can they go? Supporting theory with relatable examples, Staley shows how historical works are a complex combination of mimetic and creative imagination and offers a heuristic for assessing this ratio in any work of history. Setting out complex theoretical concepts in an accessible and understandable manner and encouraging the reader to consider both the nature and limits of historical imagination, this is an ideal volume for students and scholars of the philosophy of history.
Download or read book Imagination written by John Cocking and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-11 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins, nature, function and effects of imagination have engrossed writers, theologians, philosophers and practitioners of the arts across the ages; its influence on painting and music continues to be debated. It has been simultaneously feared as a dangerous, uncontrollable force and revered as the supreme visionary power. Cocking's Imagination is an exploration of the history of imagination from antiquity to the Renaissance. The book opens with a treatment of imagination in the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Developments in the Middle Ages are traced, with particular attention to the parallel tradition in Islamic thought of the period and the book pursues the concept through the theories of Dante and the Neo-platonists to the High Renaissance. The manuscript was left unfinished on Professor Cocking's death in 1986 and has been edited by Penelope Murray, who adds an introductory essay. The book will be of particular value as a background to the explosion of interest in the imagination in the Romantic period.
Download or read book Music and the Historical Imagination written by Leo Treitler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leo Treitler is a central figure in American musicology, both for his writings on medieval and Renaissance music and for his influential work on historical analysis. In this elegant book he develops a powerful statement of what music analysis and criticism in relation to historical understanding can be. His aim is an understanding of the music of the past not only in its own historical context but also as we apprehend it now, and as we assimilate it to our current interests and concerns. He elucidates his views through unique new interpretations of major works from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.
Download or read book More Than Real written by David Shulman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the imagination came to be recognized in South Indian culture as the defining feature of human beings. Shulman elucidates the distinctiveness of South Indian theories of the imagination and shows how they differ radically from Western notions of reality and models of the mind.
Download or read book Frontiers of Historical Imagination written by Kerwin Lee Klein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-11-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A thorough and breathtaking review of modern historiography, anthropology, and literary criticism as they relate to the American frontier."—Robert V. Hine, author of Second Sight
Download or read book Pushkin s Historical Imagination written by Svetlana Evdokimova and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the historical insights of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia’s most celebrated poet and arguably its greatest thinker. Svetlana Evdokimova examines for the first time the full range of Pushkin’s fictional and nonfictional writings on the subject of history—writings that have strongly influenced Russians’ views of themselves and their past. Through new readings of his drama, Boris Godunov; such narrative poems as Poltava, The Bronze Horseman, and Count Nulin; prose fiction, including The Captain’s Daughter and Blackamoor of Peter the Great; lyrical poems; and a variety of nonfictional texts, the author presents Pushkin not only as a progenitor of Russian national mythology but also as an original historical and political thinker. Evdokimova considers Pushkin within the context of Romantic historiography and addresses the tension between Pushkin the historian and Pushkin the fiction writer . She also discusses Pushkin’s ideas on the complex relations between chance and necessity in historical processes, on the particular significance of great individuals in Russian history, and on historical truth.
Download or read book History Imagination written by Hugh Lloyd-Jones and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jean Rhys s Historical Imagination written by Veronica Marie Gregg and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the foremost white West Indian writer of this century and author of the widely acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1890-1979) has attracted much critical attention, most often from the perspective of gender analysis. Veronica Gregg extends our critical appreciation of Rhys by analyzing the complex relationship between Rhys's identity and the structures of her fiction, and she reveals the ways in which this relationship is connected to the history of British colonization of the West Indies. Gregg focuses on Rhys as a writer--a Creole woman analyzing the question of identity through literary investigations of race, gender, and colonialism. Arguing that history itself can be a site where different narratives collide and compete, she explores Rhys's rewriting of the historical discourses of the West Indies and of European canonical texts, such as Rhys's treatment of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. Gregg's analysis also reveals the precision with which Rhys crafted her work and her preoccupation with writing as performance.
Download or read book The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain written by Donald R. Kelley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-13 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished historians and literary scholars explore the overlap, interplay, and interaction between history and fiction.
Download or read book History and Imagination written by Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1980 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Altruistic Imagination written by John Ehrenreich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social work and social policy in the United States have always had a complex and troubled relationship. In The Altruistic Imagination, John H. Ehrenreich offers a critical interpretation of their intertwined histories, seeking to understand the problems that face these two vital institutions in American society.Ehrenreich demonstrates that the emphasis of social work has always vacillated between individual treatment and social reform. Tracing this ever-changing focus from the Progressive Era, through the development of the welfare state, the New Deal, and the affluent 1950s and 1960s, into the administration of Ronald Reagan, he places the evolution of social work in the context of political, cultural, and ideological trends, noting the paradoxes inherent in the attempt to provide essential services and reflect at the same time the intentions of the state. He concludes by examining the turning point faced by the social work profession in the 1980s, indicated by a return to casework and a withdrawal from social policy concerns.
Download or read book Gardens of History and Imagination written by Gretchen Poiner and published by Sydney University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether on the ground or in the mind gardens carry meaning. They reflect social and aesthetic values and may express hope, anticipation or grief. Throughout history they have provided a means of physical survival. In creating and maintaining gardens people construe and construct a relationship with their environment. But there is no single meaning carried in the word ‘garden’: as idea and practice it reflects cultural differences in beliefs, values and social organisation. It embodies personal, community even national ways of seeing and being in the world. There are ten essays in Gardens of History and Imagination, each of which examines the role of gardens and gardening in the settlement of New South Wales and in growing a colony and a state. They explore the significance of gardens for the health of the colony, for its economy, for the construction of social order and moral worth. No less do they reveal the significance of forming and reforming personal identities in this process. For the immigrants gardening was an act of settlement; it was also a statement of possession for individuals and for Britain. For a long time it was with memories of ‘home’, often selective and idealised, that settlers made gardens but as the colony developed its own character so did gardening possibilities and practices.
Download or read book The Modernist Imagination written by Martin Jay and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the most exciting and innovative work in the humanities is occurring at the intersection of intellectual history and critical theory. This volume includes work from some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the humanities.
Download or read book Liberalism Imperialism and the Historical Imagination written by Theodore Koditschek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on the Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.
Download or read book Reason and Imagination written by Joseph Anthony Mazzeo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1962, Reason and Imagination presents collection of fourteen essays dedicated to Marjorie Hope Nicholson and is divided equally between works of her colleagues and of her former students. It contains themes like noble numbers and poetry of devotion, Cromwell as Davidic King, the isolation of the renaissances hero, Milton’s dialogue on Astronomy, music, mirth and galenic traditions in England, the Augustan conception of history, Locke and Sterne, and literary criticism and artistic interpretation, to weave a narrative of the history of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of literary history, philosophy, comparative literature, and English literature in general.
Download or read book Telling It Like It Wasn t written by Catherine Gallagher and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-01-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t, Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She doesn’t take a moral or normative stand on the practice, but focuses her attention on how it works and to what ends—a quest that takes readers on a fascinating tour of literary and historical criticism. Gallagher locates the origins of contemporary counterfactual history in eighteenth-century Europe, where the idea of other possible historical worlds first took hold in philosophical disputes about Providence before being repurposed by military theorists as a tool for improving the art of war. In the next century, counterfactualism became a legal device for deciding liability, and lengthy alternate-history fictions appeared, illustrating struggles for historical justice. These early motivations—for philosophical understanding, military improvement, and historical justice—are still evident today in our fondness for counterfactual tales. Alternate histories of the Civil War and WWII abound, but here, Gallagher shows how the counterfactual habit of replaying the recent past often shapes our understanding of the actual events themselves. The counterfactual mode lets us continue to envision our future by reconsidering the range of previous alternatives. Throughout this engaging and eye-opening book, Gallagher encourages readers to ask important questions about our obsession with counterfactual history and the roots of our tendency to ask “What if...?”
Download or read book Wordsworth s Historical Imagination Routledge Revivals written by David Simpson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally, Wordsworth’s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth’s poetry, in Simpson’s phrase, a ‘poetry of displacement’.