Download or read book John Crowe Ransom s Secular Faith written by Kieran Quinlan and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1999-03-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent interest in the life and works of John Crowe Ransom has brought to light the many apparent contradictions and discontinuities in the career of this important man of letters. A noted poet, Ransom chose to devote his energies primarily to the composition of prose. A southern agrarian in the 1930s, he later rejected the movement as nostalgic and unrealistic. But perhaps more central to his development as a man of letters, he came to renounce all traditional religious beliefs, even though he was descended from a line of Methodist ministers. In John Crowe Ransom’s Secular Faith Keiran Quinlan examines these and other incongruities within the context of the writer’s career and offers a substantially revisionist interpretation of his subject. Quinlan argues that the key to understanding Ransom’s development lies in “his early rejection of the tenets of Christian theology and in his consequent effort at articulating an alternative philosophy to live by.” Ransom’s literary efforts are viewed as a philosophical project aimed at discovering an empirical validity for the world rather than a transcendental one. Quinlan examines Ransom’s development against the background of the literary and philosophic movements that influenced the writer. He shows how thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Dewey, and the logical positivists, and poets like Arnold, Hardy, Stevens, Eliot, and Graves, all made significant contributions to Ransom’s progress. Although Ransom has often been allied with T.S. Eliot, who turned to religion and a transcendental knowledge of the world, Quinlan contends that Ransom’s real sympathies were with Wallace Stevens, who south a suitable substitute for religious faith in the celebration of a world he felt was emptied of its transcendental component. Ransom’s difficulties are in many ways symptomatic of the struggles of our age—the supplanting of God and a supernatural world view by scientific advances, the loss of faith, and thus the need to find an alternative meaning in existence. Quinlan stresses that although the gradual emergence of Ransom’s “secular faith” was a direct result of his lifelong dialogue with the Christian tradition, his final belief was that “‘this is the best of all possible worlds’; inasmuch as it is not possible for imagination to acquaint is with any other world.” Quinlan concludes, therefore, that Ransom belongs squarely in the American pragmatist tradition.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Poetry The Twentieth Century written by Eric L. Haralson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 867 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.
Download or read book Communion of Radicals written by Jonathan McGregor and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-11-03 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular perceptions of American writers as either godless radicals or God-fearing reactionaries overlook a vital tradition of Christian leftist thought and creative work. In Communion of Radicals, Jonathan McGregor offers the first literary history of theologically conservative writers who embraced political radicalism, as their reverence for tradition impelled them to work for social justice. Challenging recent accounts that examine twentieth-century American literature against the backdrop of the rising Religious Right, Communion of Radicals uncovers a different literary lineage in which allegiance to religious tradition fostered dedication to a more just future. From the Gilded Age to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, traditional faith empowered the rebellious writing of socialists, anarchists, and Catholic personalists such as Vida Scudder, Dorothy Day, Claude McKay, F. O. Matthiessen, and W. H. Auden. By recovering their strain of traditioned radicalism, McGregor shows how strong faith in the past can fuel the struggle for an equitable future. As Christian socialists, Scudder and Ralph Adams Cram envisioned their movement for beloved community as a modern version of medieval monasticism. Day and the Catholic Workers followed the fourteenth-century example of St. Francis when they lived and wrote among the disaffected souls on the Bowery during the Great Depression. Tennessee’s Fellowship of Southern Churchmen argued for a socialist and antiracist understanding of the notion of “the South and the Agrarian tradition” popularized by James McBride Dabbs, Walker Percy, and Wendell Berry. Agrarian roots flowered into creative expressions encompassing the queer and Black medievalist poetry of Auden and McKay, respectively; Matthiessen’s Catholic socialist interpretation of the American Renaissance; and the genteel anarchism of Percy’s southern comic novels. Imaginative writing enabled these Christian leftists to commune with the past and with each other, driving their radical efforts in the present. Communion of Radicals chronicles a literary Christian left that unites deeply traditional faith with radicalism, and offers a usable past that disrupts perceived alignments of religion and politics.
Download or read book The New Anthology of American Poetry written by Steven Gould Axelrod and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book includes over 600 poems by 65 american poets writing in the period between 1900 and 1950.
Download or read book Fictions of Fact and Value written by Michael LeMahieu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictions of Fact and Value looks at logical positivism's major influence on the development of postwar American fiction, charting a literary and philosophical genealogy that has been absent from criticism on the American novel since 1945.
Download or read book The Rebuke of History written by Paul V. Murphy and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1930, a group of southern intellectuals led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren published I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. A stark attack on industrial capitalism and a defiant celebration of southern culture, the book has raised the hackles of critics and provoked passionate defenses from southern loyalists ever since. As Paul Murphy shows, its effects on the evolution of American conservatism have been enduring as well. Tracing the Agrarian tradition from its origins in the 1920s through the present day, Murphy shows how what began as a radical conservative movement eventually became, alternately, a critique of twentieth-century American liberalism, a defense of the Western tradition and Christian humanism, and a form of southern traditionalism--which could include a defense of racial segregation. Although Agrarianism failed as a practical reform movement, its intellectual influence was wide-ranging, Murphy says. This influence expanded as Ransom, Tate, and Warren gained reputations as leaders of the New Criticism. More notably, such "neo-Agrarians" as Richard M. Weaver and M. E. Bradford transformed Agrarianism into a form of social and moral traditionalism that has had a significant impact on the emerging conservative movement since World War II.
Download or read book Rethinking the Irish in the American South written by Bryan Albin Giemza and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of the Irish presence in America have tended to look to the main corridors of emigration, and hence outside the American South. Yet the Irish constituted a significant minority in the region. Indeed, the Irish fascination expresses itself in southern context in powerful, but disparate, registers: music, literature, and often, a sense of shared heritage. Rethinking the Irish in the American South aims to create a readable, thorough introduction to the subject, establishing new ground for areas of inquiry. These essays offer a revisionist critique of the Irish in the South, calling into question widely held understandings of how Irish culture was transmitted. The discussion ranges from Appalachian ballads, to Gone with the Wind, to the Irish rock band U2, to Atlantic-spanning literary friendships. Rather than seeing the Irish presence as “natural” or something completed in the past, these essays posit a shifting, evolving, and unstable influence. Taken collectively, they offer a new framework for interpreting the Irish in the region. The implications extend to the interpretation of migration patterns, to the understanding of Irish diaspora, and the assimilation of immigrants and their ideas.
Download or read book American Writers written by Elizabeth H. Oakes and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "American Writers focuses on the rich diversity of American novelists
Download or read book Seamus Heaney and the End of Catholic Ireland written by Kieran Quinlan and published by Catholic University of America Press. This book was released on 2020-04-24 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seamus Heaney & the End of Catholic Ireland takes off from the poet’s growing awareness in the new millennium of “something far more important in my mental formation than cultural nationalism or the British presence or any of that stuff—namely, my early religious education.” It then pursues an examination of the full trajectory of Heaney’s religious beliefs as represented in his poetry, prose, and interviews, with a briefer account of the interactive religious histories of the Irish and international contexts in which he lived. Thus, in the 1940s and 50s, Heaney was inducted into the narrow, punitive, but also enabling Catholicism of the era. In the early 1960s he was witness to the lively religious debates from the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich’s Honest to God to the seismic disruptions of Vatican II. When the conflict in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants broke out, Heaney was forced to dig deep for an imaginative understanding of its religious roots. From the 1980s on, Heaney more and more proclaimed his own religious loss while also recognizing the institution’s residual value in an Irish society of rising prosperity, weariness with the atrocities of a partly religion-inspired IRA, and beset by the scandals of sex abuse among the clergy. Kieran Quinlan sees Heaney as an exemplar of this period of major change in Ireland as he engaged the religious issue not only in major writers such as James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Philip Larkin, and Czeslaw Miłosz, but also in a diverse array of less familiar commentators lay and clerical, creative and academic, believers and unbelievers, Irish and international. Breaking new ground by expanding the scope of Heaney’s religious preoccupations and writing in an accessible, reflective, and sometimes provocative manner, Quinlan’s study places Heaney in his universe, and that universe in turn in its wider intellectual setting.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry written by Walter Kalaidjian and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Strange Kin written by Kieran Quinlan and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ties between Ireland and the American South span four centuries and include shared ancestries, cultures, and sympathies. The striking parallels between the two regions are all the more fascinating because, studded with contrasts, they are so complex. Kieran Quinlan, a native of Ireland who now resides in Alabama, is ideally suited to offer the first in-depth exploration of this neglected subject, which he does to a brilliant degree in Strange Kin. The Irish relationship to the American South is unique, Quinlan explains, in that it involves both kin and kinship. He shows how a significant component of the southern population has Irish origins that are far more tangled than the simplistic distinction between Protestant Scotch Irish and plain Catholic Irish. African and Native Americans, too, have identified with the Irish through comparable experiences of subjugation, displacement, and starvation. The civil rights movement in the South and the peace initiative in Northern Ireland illustrate the tense intertwining that Quinlan addresses. He offers a detailed look at the connections between Irish nationalists and the Confederate cause, revealing remarkably similar historical trajectories in Ireland and the South. Both suffered defeat; both have long been seen as problematic, if also highly romanticized, areas of otherwise "progressive" nations; both have been identified with religious prejudices; and both have witnessed bitter disputes as to the interpretation of their respective "lost causes." Quinlan also examines the unexpected twentieth-century literary flowering in Ireland and the South -- as exemplified by Irish writers W. B.Yeats, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bowen, and southern authors William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. Sophisticated as well as entertaining, Strange Kin represents a benchmark in Irish-American cultural studies. Its close consideration of the familial and circumstantial resemblances between Ireland and the South will foster an enhanced understanding of each place separately, as well as of the larger British and American polities.
Download or read book A Bibliography of Tennessee History 1973 1996 written by W. Calvin Dickinson and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With some 6,000 entries, A Bibliography of Tennessee History will prove to be an invaluable resource for anyone--students, historians, librarians, genealogists--engaged in researching Tennessee's rich and colorful past. A sequel to Sam B. Smith's invaluable 1973 work, Tennessee History: A Bibliography, this book follows a similar format and includes published books and essays, as well as many unpublished theses and dissertations, that have become available during the intervening years. The volume begins with sections on Reference, Natural History, and Native Americans. Its divisions then follow the major periods of the state's history: Before Statehood, State Development, Civil War, Late Nineteenth Century, Early Twentieth Century, and Late Twentieth Century. Sections on Literature and County Histories round out the book. Included is a helpful subject index that points the reader to particular persons, places, incidents, or topics. Substantial sections in this index highlight women's history and African American history, two areas in which scholarship has proliferated during the past two decades. The history of entertainment in Tennessee is also well represented in this volume, including, for example, hundreds of citations for writings about Elvis Presley and for works that treat Nashville and Memphis as major show business centers. The Literature section, meanwhile, includes citations for fiction and poetry relating to Tennessee history as well as for critical works about Tennessee writers. Throughout, the editors have strived to achieve a balance between comprehensive coverage and the need to be selective. The result is a volume that will benefit researchers for years to come. The Editors: W. Calvin Dickinson is professor of history at Tennessee Technological University. Eloise R. Hitchcock is head reference librarian at the University of the South.
Download or read book Walker Percy the Last Catholic Novelist written by Kieran Quinlan and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate written by Marion Montgomery and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2003-03-05 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fugitives were an influential literary group that began at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s. Although the philosophically driven alliance was short-lived, two of its members, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, went on to become influential Southern poets and theorists. In this work, a self-proclaimed third-generation Fugitive-Agrarian concentrates on the history and mystery of nature. The author supports the recovery of fundamental principles required for the economic, social and political health of our communities. He explores Fugitive-Agrarian concepts of nature, history, science, industry, person, family and community. His discussion focuses particular attention on John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate and how they diverged in their philosophies of intellect and the written word.
Download or read book Concise Anthology of American Literature written by George McMichael and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 2418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The one-volume concise edition provides a varied representation of writers who give voice to the American experience. Although the concise edition offers fewer complete long works than the two-volume set, still included are Franklin, The Autobiography; Melville, Billy Budd; Miller, Death of a Salesman; and Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Download or read book John Crowe Ransom s Theory of Myth written by Jane Edwards Head and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Christian Critics written by Eugene McCarraher and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While all supported movements for the rights of labor, racial minorities, and women, some endorsed the military-industrial order that established the professional-managerial class as a dominant national force, while others favored a decentralized political economy of worker self-management. At the same time, McCarraher recasts the debate about the "therapeutic ethic" by tracing a shift, not from religion to therapy, but from religious to secular conceptions of selfhood.
