The Burdens Of Perfection

Author : Andrew H. Miller
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801460832
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Burdens of Perfection written by Andrew H. Miller and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary criticism has, in recent decades, rather fled from discussions of moral psychology, and for good reasons, too. Who would not want to flee the hectoring moralism with which it is so easily associated-portentous, pious, humorless? But in protecting us from such fates, our flight has had its costs, as we have lost the concepts needed to recognize and assess much of what distinguished nineteenth-century British literature. That literature was inescapably ethical in orientation, and to proceed as if it were not ignores a large part of what these texts have to offer, and to that degree makes less reasonable the desire to study them, rather than other documents from the period, or from other periods. Such are the intuitions that drive The Burdens of Perfection, a study of moral perfectionism in nineteenth-century British culture. Reading the period's essayists (Mill, Arnold, Carlyle), poets (Browning and Tennyson), and especially its novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James), Andrew H. Miller provides an extensive response to Stanley Cavell's contribution to ethics and philosophy of mind. In the process, Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.

Author : Rachel Ablow
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472051075
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Feeling of Reading written by Rachel Ablow and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first collection of criticism devoted to the problem of reading in Victorian literature

Author : Jonathan Quong
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199594872
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Liberalism Without Perfection written by Jonathan Quong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberalism without Perfection offers an introduction to the debate between liberal perfectionism and political liberalism. This book is a new account and defence of Rawlsian political liberalism, one of the most discussed, but widely misunderstood and criticized theories in contemporary political theory.

Author : Andrew H. Miller
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521471336
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Novels Behind Glass written by Andrew H. Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-10-19 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on work in critical theory, feminism and social history, this book traces the lines of tension shot through Victorian culture by the fear that the social world was being reduced to a display window behind which people, their actions and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others. Affecting the most basic elements of Victorian life - the vagaries of desire, the rationalisation of social life, the gendering of subjectivity, the power of nostalgia, the fear of mortality, the cyclical routines of the household - the ambivalence generated by commodity culture organizes the thematic concerns of these novels and the society they represent. Taking the commodity as their point of departure, chapters on Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 suggest that Victorian novels provide us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect the varied activities and beliefs of individual and social experience.

Author : Laura Shapiro
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520257382
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Perfection Salad written by Laura Shapiro and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-10-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This social history tells the story of America's transformation from a nation of honest appetites into an obedient market for instant mashed potatoes. The author investigates a women reformers at the turn of the twentieth century--including Fannie Farmer of the Boston Cooking School--who were determined to modernize the American diet through a "scientific" approach to cooking. It reveals why we think the way we do about food today.--Publisher's description.

Author : Michael J Sandel
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674043065
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Case against Perfection written by Michael J Sandel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature—to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why. What is wrong with re-engineering our nature? The Case against Perfection explores these and other moral quandaries connected with the quest to perfect ourselves and our children. Michael Sandel argues that the pursuit of perfection is flawed for reasons that go beyond safety and fairness. The drive to enhance human nature through genetic technologies is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements. Carrying us beyond familiar terms of political discourse, this book contends that the genetic revolution will change the way philosophers discuss ethics and will force spiritual questions back onto the political agenda. In order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is the task of this book, by one of America’s preeminent moral and political thinkers.

Author : Saint Alonso Rodríguez
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Practice of Christian Perfection. Written in Spanish ... Translated Into English by Sir John Warner Out of the French Copy of Mr. Regnier Des-Marais, Etc written by Saint Alonso Rodríguez and published by . This book was released on 1841 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Juliet John
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199593736
Total Pages : 769 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture written by Juliet John and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structured around three broad sections (on ‘Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology’, ‘Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief’, and ‘Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures’), the volume is sub-divided into 9 sub-sections each with its own ‘lead’ essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today’s Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume’s essays: that is, the nature and status of ‘literary’ culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present.

Author : John Fletcher
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 124 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Christian Perfection, being an extract from the Rev. Mr. Fletcher's Polemical Essay [i.e. “The Last Check to Antinomianism”], containing his definition of perfection, etc. [Edited by Thomas Rutherford.] written by John Fletcher and published by . This book was released on 1797 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Andrew H. Miller
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674238087
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Not Being Someone Else written by Andrew H. Miller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating book about the emotional and literary power of the lives we might have lived had our chances or choices been different. We each live one life, formed by paths taken and untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children—every decision precludes another. But what if you’d gone the other way? It can be a seductive thought, even a haunting one. Andrew H. Miller illuminates this theme of modern culture: the allure of the alternate self. From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe write of the lives we didn’t have. What forces encourage us to think this way about ourselves, and to identify with fictional and poetic voices speaking from the shadows of what might have been? Not only poets and novelists, but psychologists and philosophers have much to say on this question. Miller finds wisdom in all these sources, revealing the beauty, the power, and the struggle of our unled lives. In an elegant and provocative rumination, he lingers with other selves, listening to what they say. Peering down the path not taken can be frightening, but it has its rewards. On Not Being Someone Else offers the balm that when we confront our imaginary selves, we discover who we are.