Literature And Western Man
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Tanning and foxing
A sweeping and magisterial survey of five centuries of Western literature, Literature and Western Man is J. B. Priestley's ambitious attempt to trace the spiritual and intellectual decline of Western civilisation through its greatest written works. From the Renaissance optimism of Rabelais and Cervantes to the fragmented anxieties of the twentieth century, Priestley charts the shifting tides of human thought and belief as refracted through the prism of literature, arguing that the story of Western letters is, at its core, the story of man's estrangement from meaning, community, and faith. Written with the authority of a seasoned man of letters and the passion of a committed humanist, the work presents an panoramic critical history that is as much a cultural diagnosis as it is a work of literary scholarship. Priestley's prose is lucid, opinionated, and richly engaging — never retreating into the dry abstraction of academic criticism, but instead offering the considered judgements of a writer who has lived deeply among books. He illuminates the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Joyce with equal confidence, weaving biography, history, and criticism into a single compelling narrative. Hailed upon its publication in 1960 as a remarkable one-man achievement, Literature and Western Man remains a landmark of popular literary history — and a haunting meditation on whether Western culture still has the imaginative resources to renew itself.
Author: J. B. Priestley
Format: Hardback
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Tanning and foxing
A sweeping and magisterial survey of five centuries of Western literature, Literature and Western Man is J. B. Priestley's ambitious attempt to trace the spiritual and intellectual decline of Western civilisation through its greatest written works. From the Renaissance optimism of Rabelais and Cervantes to the fragmented anxieties of the twentieth century, Priestley charts the shifting tides of human thought and belief as refracted through the prism of literature, arguing that the story of Western letters is, at its core, the story of man's estrangement from meaning, community, and faith. Written with the authority of a seasoned man of letters and the passion of a committed humanist, the work presents an panoramic critical history that is as much a cultural diagnosis as it is a work of literary scholarship. Priestley's prose is lucid, opinionated, and richly engaging — never retreating into the dry abstraction of academic criticism, but instead offering the considered judgements of a writer who has lived deeply among books. He illuminates the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Joyce with equal confidence, weaving biography, history, and criticism into a single compelling narrative. Hailed upon its publication in 1960 as a remarkable one-man achievement, Literature and Western Man remains a landmark of popular literary history — and a haunting meditation on whether Western culture still has the imaginative resources to renew itself.