Bible teacher and popular speaker Amanda Anderson shows women how to form the safe, sane friendships that enable them to become the person God intends them to be. Amanda Anderson spent many exhausting years trying to find and become the perfect friend until she a made an illuminating discovery: all of her friends had "issues," including herself. But she found that her closest friends admitted and talked about them--and loved each other in spite of them.

Conversational and funny, All My Friends Have Issues shares practical relationship advice, biblical insights, and psychological truths that help women form the kinds of friendships they long for.

The key, Anderson says, is to build those relationships on the three pillars of healthy Christian friendship: authenticity, encouragement, and accountability. By cultivating those characteristics in friendship, women will discover the safe, satisfying relationships that lead to personal flourishing, deep well-being, and spiritual growth. Blending Scriptural teaching with the best of evidence-based therapeutic models and personal stories, All My Friends Have Issues is a liberating guide to finding and becoming the best kind of friend.

Why is liberalism so often dismissed by thinkers from both the left and the right? To those calling for wholesale transformation or claiming a monopoly on "realistic" conceptions of humanity, liberalism's assured progressivism can seem hard to swallow. Bleak Liberalism makes the case for a renewed understanding of the liberal tradition, showing that it is much more attuned to the complexity of political life than conventional accounts have acknowledged. Anderson examines canonical works of high realism, political novels from England and the United States, and modernist works to argue that liberalism has engaged sober and even stark views of historical development, political dynamics, and human and social psychology. From Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Hard Times to E. M. Forster's Howards End to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, this literature demonstrates that liberalism has inventive ways of balancing sociological critique and moral aspiration. A deft blend of intellectual history and literary analysis, Bleak Liberalism reveals a richer understanding of one of the most important political ideologies of the modern era.

Over the last few decades, character-based criticism has been seen as either naive or obsolete. But now questions of character are attracting renewed interest. Making the case for a broad-based revision of our understanding of character, Character rethinks these questions from the ground up. Is it really necessary to remind literary critics that characters are made up of words? Must we forbid identification with characters? Does character-discussion force critics to embrace humanism and outmoded theories of the subject? Across three chapters, leading scholars Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi reimagine and renew literary studies by engaging in a conversation about character. Moi returns to the fundamental theoretical assumptions that convinced literary scholars to stop doing character-criticism, and shows that they cannot hold. Felski turns to the question of identification and draws out its diverse strands, as well as its persistence in academic criticism. Anderson shows that character-criticism illuminates both the moral life of characters, and our understanding of literary form. In offering new perspectives on the question of fictional character, this thought-provoking book makes an important intervention in literary studies.

"How do we argue now? Vigorously and with vim, if Amanda Anderson's new book is any indication. Anderson worries that the poststructuralist critique of reason, together with identity politics' sociological reductionism, threatens to undermine our capacity to argue, but she puts the lie to her own concern in this well-argued book. And she gives her readers much to argue with. We should all rise to her challenge and respond to this book in ways that participate in, extend, and (dare I say it?) trouble the culture of argument that Anderson here seeks to promote and surely exemplifies."--Bonnie Honig, Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University and senior research fellow, American Bar Foundation

"An intellectual achievement of the first rank and the work of a powerful and independent mind. We are invited to rethink the premises of contemporary theory in a manner that is invigorating and eye-opening. Anderson's own incisive contribution to the culture of argument will surely change the way many people think."--Rita Felski, University of Virginia, author of "Literature after Feminism"

"This book addresses a broad range of controverted subjects with great tact, generosity, and persuasive force. Its readers, whatever their theoretical allegiance, will have to acknowledge this accomplishment. It is rare to read so intelligent and thought-provoking a book as this."--John Guillory, New York University, author of "Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation"

"A shrewd and witty dissection of contemporary academic theory's discontents. Anderson's anti-anti-Enlightenment argument serves as a refreshing antidote to the symptomatic prejudices of our age."--NancyFraser, Henry A.and Louise Loeb Professor, Graduate Faculty, New School

Contemporary celebrations of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences often harbor a distrust of traditional disciplines, which are seen as at best narrow and unimaginative, and at worst complicit in larger forms of power and policing. "Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle" questions these assumptions by examining, for the first time, in so sustained a manner, the rise of a select number of academic disciplines in a historical perspective.

This collection of twelve essays focuses on the late Victorian era in Great Britain but also on Germany, France, and America in the same formative period. The contributors--James Buzard, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Liah Greenfeld, John Guillory, Simon Joyce, Henrika Kuklick, Christopher Lane, Jeff Nunokawa, Arkady Plotnitsky, Ivan Strenski, Athena Vrettos, and Gauri Viswanathan--examine the genealogy of various fields including English, sociology, economics, psychology, and quantum physics. Together with the editors' cogent introduction, they challenge the story of disciplinary formation as solely one of consolidation, constraint, and ideological justification.

Addressing a broad range of issues--disciplinary formations, disciplinarity and professionalism, disciplines of the self, discipline and the state, and current disciplinary debates--the book aims to dislodge what the editors call the "comfortable pessimism" that too readily assimilates disciplines to techniques of management or control. It advances considerably the effort to more fully comprehend the complex legacy of the human sciences."

Combining analysis of Victorian literature and culture with forceful theoretical argument, "The Powers of Distance" examines the progressive potential of those forms of cultivated detachment associated with Enlightenment and modern thought. Amanda Anderson explores a range of practices in nineteenth-century British culture, including methods of objectivity in social science, practices of omniscience in artistic realism, and the complex forms of affiliation in Victorian cosmopolitanism. Anderson demonstrates that many writers--including George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Bronte, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde--thoughtfully address the challenging moral questions that attend stances of detachment. In so doing, she offers a revisionist account of Victorian culture and a tempered defense of detachment as an ongoing practice and aspiration.

"The Powers of Distance" illuminates its historical object of study and provides a powerful example for its theoretical argument, showing that an ideal of critical detachment underlies the ironic modes of modernism and postmodernism as well as the tradition of Enlightenment thought and critical theory. Its broad understanding of detachment and cultivated distance, together with its focused historical analysis, will appeal to theorists and critics across the humanities, particularly those working in literary and cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonialism. Original in scope and thesis, this book constitutes a major contribution to literary history and contemporary theory."

We live in a psychological age. Contemporary culture is saturated with psychological concepts and ideas, from anxiety to narcissism to trauma. While it might seem that concern over psychological conditions and challenges is intrinsically oriented toward moral questions about what promotes individual and collective well-being, it is striking that from the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth-century up to recent findings in cognitive science, psychology has posed a continuing challenge to traditional concepts of moral deliberation, judgment, and action, all core components of moral philosophy and central to understandings of character and tragedy in literature. Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life After Psychology explores the nature of psychology's consequential effects on our understanding of the moral life. Using a range of examples from literature and literary criticism alongside discussions of psychological literature from psychoanalysis to recent cognitive science and social psychology, this study argues for a renewed look at the persistence of moral orientations toward life and the values of integrity, fidelity, and repair that they privilege. Writings by Shakespeare, Henry James, and George Eliot, and the powerful contributions of British object relations theorists in the post-war period, help to draw out the fundamental ways we experience moral time, the forms of elusive duration that constitute loss, grief, regret, and the desire for amends. Acknowledging the power and necessity of psychological frameworks, Psyche and Ethos aims to restore moral understanding and moral experience to a more central place in our understanding of psychic life and the literary tradition.

Meredith Richardson had struggled her whole life. First with the fact that she had no father, then with her teenage pregnancy and marriage, later she struggled with her husband's illness and death. Her life seemed to be one trial after another and all she could do was survive and attempt to give her young daughter a stable life. Then as if out of the blue she was confronted by a determined force that would wrench her out of her self-imposed solitude and back into the world of the living. Jackson St. John was a man of ambition. He had built his fortune with a will of iron, but he was driven by a past he could not escape. With all that he had accomplished he still lacked what he wanted most, a family. When he walked into C.R. Distribution furious over an invoice dispute he was not expecting to come face to face with a pair of sad hazel eyes that would change his life. Now Jackson must fight to have her when she wanted nothing more than to be left alone. He must convince her that life was worth the pain of living. When tragedy and circumstances threatened to tear them apart they must learn to trust in the love they had found to overcome the hurdles life placed in their path or let go and live in misery apart.

Euan MacTern has fought an all encompassing darkness for fifteen years. He had no understanding of why it tormented his soul with its evil, but he fought it hoping to find a way to escape it. The laughter of a silver haired beauty gave him the first glimpse of freedom, but when he wanted to claim her the darkness fought him. Now he must fight a war inside his own mind to claim his mate before the darkness forces him to kill her. Can he find a way to free his soul from, the overwhelming darkness and realize the future that has been promised to him or will the darkness win and take the one thing that is more precious than his soul, his mate?

Prostitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seduction-the Victorian "fallen woman" represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.