George Santayana's America

Fülszöveg

The sixteen essays by George Santayana collected here for the first time in one volume present the renowned philosopher's views on American literature and culture from 1886, when he graduated from Harvard, to 1922, two years after he published Character and Opinion in the United States. Written with the sympathy, irony, detachment, and comprehensiveness of mind peculiar to Santayana5 s genius, these essays touch on the tradition and culture of 19th-century Boston, life at Yale and Harvard, the poetry of Emerson and Whitman, philistinism, gentility, and America's young radicals. Taken as a whole they reflect the noticeable change in American intellect from 19th-century puritán gentility to 20th-century, post-World War I radicalism and materialism. Proceeding from a brief biography of Santayana, "the inveteri ate traveler on a priváté odyssey," Professor Ballowe provides a penetrating critical analysis of the essayist's attitudes and philosophy regarding American life and letters,... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The sixteen essays by George Santayana collected here for the first time in one volume present the renowned philosopher's views on American literature and culture from 1886, when he graduated from Harvard, to 1922, two years after he published Character and Opinion in the United States. Written with the sympathy, irony, detachment, and comprehensiveness of mind peculiar to Santayana5 s genius, these essays touch on the tradition and culture of 19th-century Boston, life at Yale and Harvard, the poetry of Emerson and Whitman, philistinism, gentility, and America's young radicals. Taken as a whole they reflect the noticeable change in American intellect from 19th-century puritán gentility to 20th-century, post-World War I radicalism and materialism. Proceeding from a brief biography of Santayana, "the inveteri ate traveler on a priváté odyssey," Professor Ballowe provides a penetrating critical analysis of the essayist's attitudes and philosophy regarding American life and letters, particularly his theory of "two Americas" - progressive, practical, mechanistic on the one hand, regressive, genteel, and effete on the other. He then divides the essays into three sections to emphasize the basic consistency in Santayana5 s criticism and point up relationships between the selections presented and the main body of Santayana5s critical work on America. James Ballowe is associate professor of English at Bradley University. AN HUNI BOOK FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Vissza