San Antonio College Library

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century Americans were faced with the challenges--and the uncertainties--of a new era. The comfortable Victorian values of continuity, progress, and order clashed with the unsettling modern notions of constant change, relative truth, and chaos. Attempting to embrace the intellectual challenges of modernism, American thinkers of the day were yet reluctant to welcome the wholesale rejection of the past and destruction...

The author chronicles the breakdown of Enlightenment values as the elitist and rationalist legacy of Jeffersonianism gave way to the populist and capitalist fervor of the Jacksonian era. Documenting the bewildering political and cultural changes between 1800 and 1830, Matthews demonstrates how the questions raised in all areas of cultural and intellectual life were fundamentally about the nature of the Republic itself.

"With its representative government, religious tolerance, precocious industrialization, and pioneering individualism, eighteenth-century Britain was at the cutting edge of political, social, and intellectual innovation. Porter examines the influence of such heroic figures as Bacon, Newton, and Locke in shaping the British Enlightenment, as well as the impact of other English essayists and novelists in popularizing modern thought. He persuasively demonstrates...

In these perceptive essays, the highly regarded historian Gertrude Himmelfarb critically examines the cultural and ideological fashions of contemporary America. She analyzes the intellectual arrogance and spiritual impoverishment at the heart of such current academic movements in history, literature, and philosophy as structuralism, deconstructionism, and postmodernism - and shows how they have led to the belittling of one of the great tragedies of...

Marks shows that...Russia's lines of influence were many and reached far. Russia gave the world new ways of writing novels. It launched cutting-edge trends in ballet, theater, and art that revolutionized contemporary cultural life. The Russian anarchist movement benignly shaped the rise of vegetarianism and environmentalism while also giving birth to the violent methods of modern terrorist organizations. Tolstoy's visions of nonviolent resistance...

"Beauty offers an elegant investigation of ancient Greek notions of beauty and, in the process, sheds light on how we ought to appreciate the artistic achievements of the classical world. The book opens by reexamining the commonly held notion that the ancient Greeks possessed no term that can be unambiguously defined as "beauty" or "beautiful." Author David Konstan discusses a number of Greek approximations before positioning the heretofore unexamined...

Defying Gravity is a major reassessment of the work of Jean Paulhan within the context of his own times, as well as in the light of contemporary debates in literary theory. Best known for his long-serving editorship of the influential Parisian literary review, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Paulhan is now widely acknowledged as one of the most central yet least understood figures of twentieth-century French intellectual and literary history. Syrotinski's...