The Modern Tradition

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Lionel Trilling says, "I am delighted with The Modern Tradition. It is truly a superb anthology, conceived and executed with fine intelligence. It cannot fail to be of the greatest interest and usefulness to anyone concerned with modern culture or with the history of culture in general."
What is modern and what traditional in "the modern tradition"? This book is perhaps the first major attempt to answer these questions. It brings together the ideas of poets and novelists with those of scientists, artists, and speculative thinkers. These men, though in dissimilar fields, prove to be unexpectedly related to each other, as if they were alike participants in a communal and imaginative enterprise.
The view of the twentieth century here is comprehensive yet sharply outlined. Familiar words fike symbolism, reaUsm, myth, the unconscious, or existentialism are exemplified by original rather than second-hand statements. The blurred feeling of modernity which new books often arouse is... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Lionel Trilling says, "I am delighted with The Modern Tradition. It is truly a superb anthology, conceived and executed with fine intelligence. It cannot fail to be of the greatest interest and usefulness to anyone concerned with modern culture or with the history of culture in general."
What is modern and what traditional in "the modern tradition"? This book is perhaps the first major attempt to answer these questions. It brings together the ideas of poets and novelists with those of scientists, artists, and speculative thinkers. These men, though in dissimilar fields, prove to be unexpectedly related to each other, as if they were alike participants in a communal and imaginative enterprise.
The view of the twentieth century here is comprehensive yet sharply outlined. Familiar words fike symbolism, reaUsm, myth, the unconscious, or existentialism are exemplified by original rather than second-hand statements. The blurred feeling of modernity which new books often arouse is here given a specific weight and density.
The book becomes, in fact, a modern, educated man's guide to the intellectual world about him.
The selections have been carefully made from essays, letters, novels, and speculative writings. They are arranged in nine sections so as to represent the major topics of the modern consciousness. The first two, Sym-bofism and ReaUsm, address themselves to aesthetic ideas; the others bring forward systematically the other ideas that possess men's

minds today. The readings ui Nature, for instance, cover theories of organic harmony, biological struggle, mechanistic force, and scientific experiment. Cultural History traces the theme of human freedom in historical experience as well as intellectual patterns schematizing the historical process. The Unconscious and Myth are more psychological in emphasis, while the final sections, Self-Consciousness, Existence, and Faith, center upon subjective individual experience and ethical and religious questions.
The editors, in introductions to each section, explain the relations of the ideas within it. In the preface they examine the modem tradition which their book freshly and convincingly defines.
THE EDITORS
Richard Ellmann, who is Franklin Bliss Snyder Professor of English at Northwestern University, was educated at Yale University and Trinity College, Dublin. After teaching English at Harvard University for five years, he joined the faculty at Northwestern University in 1951. His books include the biography James Joyce, which won the National Book Award; The Identity of Yeats; Yeats: The Man and the Masks; and numerous edited works.
Charles Feidelson, Jr. is Professor of English at Yale University. He attended Yale and Cambridge Universities and received the Bachelor of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Yale. In 1956-57 he held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he lectured in Italy on a Fulbright appointment in 1960-61. The author of Symbolism and American Literature, he is the editor of a recent annotated text of Moby Dick and co-editor of Interpretations of American Literature.
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