Challenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. Mor...(展开全部)

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as ...(展开全部)

The second volume of Peter Gay's in-depth study of the dawn of the modern world—the Age of Reason. The Science of Freedom completes Peter Gay's brilliant reinterpretation begun in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism . In the present book, he describes the philosophes' program and their views of society. His masterful appraisal opens a new range of insights into...(展开全部)

In Poetic Justice, one of our most prominent philosophers explores how the literary imagination is an essential ingredient of just public discourse and a democratic society.

A panorama of a whole civilization, a world on the verge of cataclysm, unfolds in this magisterial work by the foremost historian of eighteenth-century France. Since Tocqueville's account of the Old Regime, historians have struggled to understand the social, cultural, and political intricacies of this efflorescence of French society before the Revolution. France in the E...(展开全部)

A groundbreaking work that places the mechanical arts and the world of making at the heart of the Enlightenment What would the Enlightenment look like from the perspective of artistes, the learned artisans with esprit, who presented themselves in contrast to philosophers, savants, and routine-bound craftsmen? Making a radical change of historical protagonists, Paola Bertucci pl...(展开全部)

What the British 'knew' about China changed fundamentally in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period, China became a key focus of British commercial and missionary interests, creating urgent demand for new knowledge about the country. This change in British understanding of and views about Chinese language, culture, politics and economy has typica...(展开全部)

Has "theory" neglected literature? Often literary and cultural theory, which goes by the nickname "Theory," has seemed to be the theory of everything except literature: theory of language, of sexuality, of history, of the body, of the psyche, of meaning (or meaninglessness), of politics, but not theory of literature. In this timely and wide-ranging book, Jonathan Culler, whose ...(展开全部)

Has "theory" neglected literature? Often literary and cultural theory, which goes by the nickname "Theory," has seemed to be the theory of everything except literature: theory of language, of sexuality, of history, of the body, of the psyche, of meaning (or meaninglessness), of politics, but not theory of literature. In this timely and wide-ranging book, Jonathan Culler, whose ...(展开全部)