Brent E. Kinser – författare

'It is I think the most radical Book that has been written in these late centuries . . . and will give pleasure and displeasure, one may expect, to almost all classes of persons.' CarlyleThomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution opens with the death of Louis XV in 1774 and ends with Napoleon suppressing the insurrection of the 13th Vendémaire. Both in Its form and content, the work was intended as a revolt against history writing itself, with Carlyle exploding the eighteenth-century conventions of dignified gentlemanly discourse. Immersing himself in his French sources with unprecedented imaginative and intellectual engagement, he recreates the upheaval in a language that evokes the chaotic atmosphere of the events. In the French Revolution Carlyle achieves the most vivid historical reconstruction of the crisis of his, or any other, age.This new edition offers an authoritative text, a comprehensive record of Carlyle's French, English, and German sources, a select bibliography of editions, related writings, and critical studies, chronologies of both Thomas Carlyle and the French Revolution, and a new and full index. In addition, Carlyle's work is placed in the context of both British and European history and writing, and linked to a variety of major figures, including Edward Gibbon, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, and R. G. Collingwood.

Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843) was a prophetic warning of impending disaster for mid-Victorian Britain that was delivered in what the author described as a 'miraculous thunder-voice, from out of the centre of the world.' The impact of Carlyle's social criticism was immediate and profound, shaping debate about the 'The Condition of England' question well into the twentieth century and beyond, and serving as the moral foundation of the welfare state. His relentlessly abrasive and illuminating critique of industrial civilization generated a vast range of response both in England, Europe, and the United States. The writings of Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, William Morris, John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin, as well as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, were saturated with imagery and ideas directly indebted to the book. Past and Present also provided novelists and poets with an enduring vision of the ubiquitous rot that lay at the heart of 'laissez-faire' England. The repercussions of Carlyle's unique analysis can be witnessed in the literary form and thematic content of such works as Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1848), Bleak House (1852-53), and Hard Times (1854); Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil (1845); Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855); and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850). Poets such as Alfred Tennyson in Maud (1855), Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (1856), and Arthur Hugh Clough in The Latest Decalogue (1862) built a vocabulary that was steeped in the outrage and indignation of Carlyle's polemic. The artist Ford Madox Brown attempted in his painting Work (1852-65) to give visual testimony to the profound social schisms that Carlyle had exposed in Past and Present and to pay tribute to the 'Sage' who had 'moulded a nation to his pattern.'

Essays on Literature brings together ten of the most important literary reviews and essays written by the acclaimed Victorian philosopher, social critic, and essayist Thomas Carlyle. Spanning his writing career, the essays allow the reader to track Carlyle's development as a reviewer and stylist, the evolution of his perennial themes, and the tremendous impact of his writing on the development of British and American literature. In keeping with the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, these essays are accompanied by a thorough historical introduction to the material, extensive notes providing historical and cultural context while expanding on references and allusions, and a textual apparatus that carefully details and explains the editorial decisions made in reconciling the many editions of each essay.

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, a central question for British intellectuals was whether or not the American conflict was proof of the viability of democracy as a foundation for modern governance. The lessons of the American Civil War for Britain would remain a focal point in the debate on democracy throughout the war up to the suffrage reform of 1867, and after. Brent E. Kinser considers four figures connected by Woodrow Wilson's concept of the "Literary Politician," a person who, while possessing a profound knowledge of politics combined with an equally acute literary ability to express that knowledge, escapes the practical drudgeries of policy making. Kinser argues that the animosity of Thomas Carlyle towards democracy, the rhetorical strategy of Anthony Trollope's North America, the centrality of the American war in Walter Bagehot's vision of British governance, and the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill illustrate the American conflict's vital presence in the debates leading up to the 1867 reform, a legislative event that helped to secure democracy's place in the British political system.

Exploring the rich, enduring companionship shared by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Julia Scribner Bigham through never-before-published letters, Marge and Julia provides a revelatory depiction of these two literary women’s experiences in mid-twentieth-century America.Pulitzer Prize–winning author Rawlings was first introduced to Julia Scribner (later Bigham), daughter of publishing magnate Charles Scribner III, shortly after the legendary House of Scribner published The Yearling to runaway success. Though Julia’s New York City life was far removed from the rural world of Cross Creek, the two women remained close until Rawlings’s death in 1953, after which Scribner Bigham served as Rawlings’s literary executor. In this documentary edition of 211 of their letters, Rawlings’s and Bigham’s perspectives on the world are woven through over a decade of intimate discussion and advice about relationships, motherhood, mental health, politics, art, and literature.Supplementing the letters with an introduction, explanatory footnotes, and a reminiscence by Scribner Bigham’s eldest daughter, Hildreth Scribner Bigham, MD, this edition provides historical context and prompts readers to inspect the facets of both women’s complex relationship with issues such as racial discrimination, class, and gender inequality. These letters offer an unprecedented performance of two women’s intimate friendship, one that transcended the limitations of patriarchy as they wrote their lives in letters.

A collection of literary work that shows the artistic development of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author From her first poems and stories to her finely crafted essays as a newspaper and feature writer to the gathering brilliance that began at the outset of her Florida Period, highlighted by the Pulitzer Prize for The Yearling in 1939, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings became, in the words of Margaret Mitchell, America's "born perfect storyteller." Arguing that Rawlings has been underestimated and underappreciated as a great American writer, Rodger Tarr and Brent Kinser present Rawlings's emergence and maturation as an artist. This collection brings together for the first time the work that contributed to her once stellar position as a hero of American letters. Rawlings's childhood publications in the Washington Post and McCall's magazine reveal a budding Romantic if not an emerging Transcendentalist determined to pursue humanity's relationship with nature. As a young storyteller Rawlings had a compelling interest in fairytales, marked by a sense of the comedic and the sentimental, and always the moral. Many of her early stories and poems, especially those written while she was a student at the University of Wisconsin, also reflect her developing feminist spirit, an interest that she continued to pursue as a feature writer for newspapers in Louisville, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York. Like many writers, Rawlings was self-critical. She was particularly aware of writing as a discipline and as an adult was prone to dismiss her early work as overly wrought. However, as her mature work demonstrates, she owed a great deal to the skills learned in her development as an artist. Rawlings knew that successful writing owed less to inspiration than to hard work, a lesson she experienced repeatedly during the writing of her stories and novels under the guiding hand of her celebrated editor Maxwell E. Perkins. This collection of early work, college writing, newspaper pieces, and stories of life in Florida is an intimate glimpse at an important writer mastering her craft.