This volume is the best-known and most widely discussed work of
the influential scholar and critic Irving Babbitt (1865-1933),
intellectual leader of the movement known as the New Humanism. It
is also the work that best conveys the ethical and aesthetic core
of his thought. Broad in scope, it examines a variety of
manifestations of romanticism and presents a typology of the
imaginative inclinations of that movement Rousseau is analyzed as
paradigmatic of the ethical and aesthetic sensibility that is
replacing the classical and Christian outlook in the Western world.
For Babbitt, works of imagination are integral to human life in
general. He explores romanticism with a view to its implications
for Western civilization.
Babbitt identifies serious ethical, religious, aesthetic, and
philosophical problems in the modern world, but he also shows how
remedies to those problems must incorporate the best insights of
modernity. First published in 1919, the book is strikingly relevant
to today's discussion of the crisis of American and Western culture
and education. Babbitt anticipated and analyzed dangerous cultural
trends whose consequences are now widely bemoaned. He applies to
these phenomena an intellectual breadth and depth rare today. At
the end of the twentieth century his prescriptions for dealing with
the central problems of Western civilization have acquired an acute
urgency. At a time of much renewed interest in Rousseau, Babbitt's
book offers a penetrating commentary that challenges widely held
beliefs and interpretations.
Graced with a lengthy and wide-ranging new introduction by
Claes G. Ryn, "Rousseau and Romanticism "is simultaneously a work
of literary history, criticism, and a theory of civilization. In
addressing its special subject, this classic study reflects the
main themes of Babbitt's thought, making it representative of his
work as a whole. Ryn explicates and critically assesses Babbitt's
central ideas, refutes widely circulating misinterpretations, and
demonstrates the relevance of his writing in the intellectual and
cultural circumstances of today.
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