Costerus New
2 primary works
Book 213
Eighteenth-century literature is often associated with the birth of the realistic novel, just as the Romantic movement is often associated with intellectual idealism. This study asks its readers to reconsider and perhaps even to invert impressions like these. It re-examines English Romantic literature in the light of a profound shift of realistic understanding, going beyond the empirical representation of people and objects into new and bold explorations of moral psychology.
Book 222
In Literature and Truth Richard Lansdown continues a discussion concerning the truth-bearing status of imaginative literature that pre-dates Plato. The book opens with a general survey of contemporary approaches in philosophical aesthetics, and a discussion of the contribution to the question made by British philosopher R. G. Collingwood in particular, in his Speculum Mentis. It then offers six case-studies from the Romantic era to the contemporary one as to how imaginative authors have variously dealt with bodies of discursive thought such as Stoicism, Christianity, evolution, humanism, and socialism. It concludes with a reading going in the other direction, in which the diary of Bronislaw Malinowski is seen in terms of the anthropologist's reading habits during his legendary Trobriander fieldwork.