Matthew Arnold – författare

'One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.'Poet, education reformer, social theorist and passionate critic of Victorian England, Matthew Arnold condemned an industrial society in 'bondage to machinery' and argued instead that the wonder and joy of culture - in particular the 'sweetness and light' of classical civilization - were essential to human life. The other pieces here, on literary criticism, schools, France, journalism and democracy, form a powerful call to arms from a writer who believed that the English needed to be taught not what to think, but how to think. Edited with an introduction by P. J. Keating.

A scholarly edition of the letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough.  The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

'The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.'Matthew Arnold's famous series of essays, which were first published in book form under the title Culture and Anarchy in 1869, debate important questions about the nature of culture and society that are as relevant now as they have ever been. Arnold seeks to find out 'what culture really is, what good it can do, what is our own special need of it' in an age of rapid social change and increasing mechanization. He contrasts culture, 'the study of perfection', with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England. How can individuals be educated, not indoctrinated, and what is the role of the state in disseminating 'sweetness and light'? This edition reproduces the original book version and enables readers to appreciate its immediate historical context as well as the reasons for its continued importance today, in the face of the challenges of multi-culturalism and post-modernism. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Culture and Anarchy is one of the central texts of the western intellectual tradition and has helped to shape thinking about the tasks and requirements of culture and civil society. The book is particularly relevant now, however, because it articulates many issues about culture and cultural politics that are being intensely debated today. In the past decade, Culture and Anarchy has been the subject of discussion by both the cultural right and the cultural left, beloved by the one because it asserts the primacy of reason over the anarchy of doing as one likes, and despised by the other because it champions what many liberals consider an elitist model of culture. This new edition of Culture and Anarchy addresses this debate by including specially commissioned essays by Maurice Cowling, Gerald Graff, Samuel Lipman, and Steven Marcus that analyze Arnold's ideas from divergent political and literary perspectives and link them to contemporary concerns over the health of western culture in an increasingly multicultural society. The edition reprints for the first time in unaltered form the original 1869 text of Culture and Anarchy, providing valuable insight into Arnold's authorial intent; it is supplemented by a useful glossary of names, terms, and events and an introduction by Lipman that places Arnold in his time and discusses his initial reception and continuing importance today.

An inspector of schools as well as a professor of poetry, Matthew Arnold was an educator in the true sense of the word. Watching democracy breed self-satisfied Philistines, he relized that not all the liberty and industry in the world would insure the rule of right reason. If we are to survive, he said, we must seize on the best and make it prevail. The fate of civilization depends on our schools. Unfailingly relevant, his essays on education include Democracy, The Popular Education of France, and A French Eton, as well as three essays discovered by the editor in the pages of the London Review and republished here for the first time. They form a crucial chapter in the history of education, setting forth the standards upon which Arnold's literary criticism was to be based and from which his political utterances were to come.

A wonderful collection of intimate, personal, sentimental, and even nostalgic works by the greatly admired Victorian poet. Filled with lyric inspiration and lofty meditative characters, the selections include "The Scholar Gipsy," "Thyrsis," "The Forsaken Merman," "Memorial Verses," "Rugby Chapel," and the famous title poem.

Manifesting the special intelligence of a literary critic of original gifts, Culture and Anarchy is still a living classic. It is addressed to the flexible and the disinterested, to those who are not committed to the findings of their particular discipline, and it assumes in its reader a critical intelligence that will begin its work with the reader himself. Arnold employs a delicate and stringent irony in an examination of the society of his time: a rapidly expanding industrial society, just beginning to accustom itself to the changes in its institutions that the pace of its own development called for. Coming virtually at the end of the decade (1868) and immediately prior to W. E. Forster's Education Act, Culture and Anarchy phrases with a particular cogency the problems that find their centre in the questions: what kind of life do we think individuals in mass societies should be assisted to lead? How may we best ensure that the quality of their living is not impoverished? Arnold applies himself to the detail of his time: to the case of Mr Smith 'who feared he would come to poverty and be eternally lost', to the Reform agitation, to the commercial values that working people were encouraged to respect, and to the limitations of even the best Rationalist intelligence. The degree of local reference is therefore high, but John Dover Wilson's introduction and notes to this edition supply valuable assistance to a reader fresh to the period.

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) is one of the most celebrated works of social criticism ever written. It has become an inescapable reference-point for all subsequent discussion of the relations between politics and culture, and it has exercised a profound influence both on conceptions of the distinctive nature of British society, and on ideas about education and the teaching of literature more generally. This edition establishes the authoritative text of this much-revised work, and places it alongside Arnold's three most important essays on political subjects - Democracy, Equality, and The Function of Criticism at the Present Time. The editor's substantial introduction situates these works in the context both of Arnold's life and other writings, and of nineteenth-century intellectual and political history. This edition also contains a chronology of Arnold's life, a bibliographical guide and full notes on the names, books, and historical events mentioned in the texts.