Saul Bellow and American Transcendentalism explores Saul Bellow's moral and philosophical affinity with the writers of American transcendentalism, especially Emerson and Whitman. Its focus is on the «vintage» Bellow, or his «mature» novels, from Henderson the Rain King (1959) to The Dean's December (1982). In these novels, Bellow highlights a moral crisis, arising from humankind's despiritualization and dehumanization, which, he believes, is responsible for an ongoing dichotomy in the modern world. Bellow describes this as a dichotomy of the «Cleans» and the «Dirties», in the context of American culture. To rectify this dichotomy and redeem humankind from its current «death-ridden» state, Bellow and his protagonists advance a vision of life that corresponds to the transcendental vision of dialogue and «double consciousness», or coordination and balance. Like Emerson, they advocate, «The mid-world is best... A man is a golden impossibility; the line he must walk is a hair's breadth». Comparable to Whitman, they urge the individual to «knit the knot of contrariety» and act as «an arbiter of the diverse».

The First Comprehensive History of Transcendentalism American Transcendentalism is a comprehensive narrative history of America's first group of public intellectuals, the men and women who defined American literature and indelibly marked American reform in the decades before and following the America Civil War. Philip F. Gura masterfully traces their intellectual genealogy to transatlantic religious and philosophical ideas, illustrating how these informed the fierce local theological debates that, so often first in Massachusetts and eventually throughout America, gave rise to practical, personal, and quixotic attempts to improve, even perfect the world. The transcendentalists would painfully bifurcate over what could be attained and how, one half epitomized by Ralph Waldo Emerson and stressing self-reliant individualism, the other by Orestes Brownson, George Ripley, and Theodore Parker, emphasizing commitment to the larger social good. By the 1850s, the uniquely American problem of slavery dissolved differences as transcendentalists turned ever more exclusively to abolition. Along with their early inheritance from European Romanticism, America's transcendentalists abandoned their interest in general humanitarian reform. By war's end, transcendentalism had become identified exclusively with Emersonian self-reliance, congruent with the national ethos of political liberalism and market capitalism.

This book demonstrates the complexity of Bellow's work by emphasizing the ways in which it reflects the changing conditions of American identity.

Transcendentalism was the first major intellectual movement in U.S. history, championing the inherent divinity of each individual, as well as the value of collective social action. In the mid-nineteenth century, the movement took off, changing how Americans thought about religion, literature, the natural world, class distinctions, the role of women, and the existence of slavery. Edited by the eminent scholar Lawrence Buell, this comprehensive anthology contains the essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellow visionaries. There are also reflections on the movement by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This remarkable volume introduces the radical innovations of a brilliant group of thinkers whose impact on religious thought, social reform, philosophy, and literature continues to reverberate in the twenty-first century.

Pifer contends that Bellow's fiction is fundamentally radical. Going against the grain of contemporary culture and its secular pieties, he undermines accepted notions of reality and challenges the "orthodoxies" created by materialist values and rationalist thought. Charged by his belief in the soul, his 10 novels test the assumptions of traditional realism. Pifer stresses the importance to Bellow of the invisible world, the longing for revelation, and the capacity to love and to suffer. She also shows how Bellow's hero is a man torn between his modern predilection for secular rationalism and a primordial attachment to the soul, and how he is led to demolish reigning idols of contemporary thought and culture. ISBN 0-8122-8203-5: $29.95.

本书主要从当代重要作家作品个案研究入手，探讨当代外国文学经典的生成与传播。书中分别从奥登、弗罗斯特、塞克斯顿、特德·休斯的诗歌经典为例证，展示当代西方诗歌的精神渊源，探寻索尔·贝娄、帕斯捷尔纳克、纳博科夫等当代作家代表作品的经典化历程。

This collection of essays brings together work by some of the most internationally acclaimed critics of Malaysian literature in English from different parts of the world, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and the US. It investigates the works of major writers of the tradition in the genres of drama, fiction and poetry, from its beginnings to the present, focusing mainly on thematic and stylistic trends. The book pays particular attention to issues such as gender, ethnicity, nationalism, multiculturalism, diaspora, hybridity and transnationalism, which are central to the creativity and imagination of these writers. The chapters collectively address the challenges and achievements of writers in the English language in a country where English, first introduced by the colonisers, has experienced a mixed fate of ups and downs in the post-independence period, due to the changing, and sometimes strikingly different, policies adopted by the government. The book will be of interest to readers and researchers of Malaysian literature, Southeast Asian studies and postcolonial literatures.