Herbert Read (1893–1968) acquired in his lifetime a considerable international reputation in all the major areas of his diverse activities: as poet, as educationalist, as anarchist, as philosopher (of aesthetics), as art critic, as historian of, and above all, as propagandist for modern art and design. The papers assembled in Herbert Read Reassessed offer a comprehensive and authoritative coverage of Read’s life work that is designed to stimulate debate. "An impressive volume... it manages to present a unified but not totalizing portrait of one of England’s most distinguished twentieth-century critics."—English Historical Review

A classic work that offers the reader an ideal overview of the ideas that marked out Read as a seminal and hugely influetial figure in the cultural life of the twentieth century.

As a poet and critic of art and literature, and as a social and political philosopher, Sir Herbert Read exerted an important influence on the culture of his time. Not only did he assist and inspire many writers and artists, but through his work for the idea of ‘education through art’, he greatly influenced education, in particular the teaching of art and literature in schools. For this symposium, first issued in 1969 as the ninth number of The Malahat Review, Professor Skelton has gathered together original essays, poems and drawings which illustrate many aspects of Sir Herbert Read’s life and work.

Herbert Read and Selected Works includes four of Herbert Read’s most seminal works; A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays, The English Vision: An Anthology, The Tenth Muse: Essays in Criticism and The Politics of the Unpolitical. This collection also includes the title Herbert Read: A Memorial Symposium - a collection of essays that illustrates the many different aspects and achievements of Read’s career.

This volume examines the criticism of five influential British writers on the visual arts—John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and Sir Herbert Read. Their works span a period in the history of art that “in productivity and significance is more impressive than any other period since the Renaissance.” Each of these writers possesses extraordinary literary skills. Another common tie is their awareness of serving as spokesmen for art to an audience that was mainly indifferent or even hostile. Even though the aesthetic outlook of Pater, Fry, and Bell represents a violent reaction to Ruskin’s moralistic and literary interpretation of art, they were no less concerned than he to overcome the national apathy toward art and to assert its cultural importance. Sir Herbert Read reconciles the oppositions in the work of his predecessors in an aesthetic philosophy that stresses the social and ethnical values of art without sacrificing the idea of individual expression. The major part of Solomon Fishman’s study is an examination of the aesthetic theories embodied in the writings of each critic. He extracts the theoretical assumptions that form the basis of each writer’s critical practice and traces the development of aesthetic doctrine as it was modified by the critic’s experience of actual works of art. The body of work of these writers is representative of the whole development of modern art criticism and aesthetic theory. Although they display great diversity in ideas and taste, all five critics were instrumental in shaping the response of the public, first of all toward art in general, and finally toward modern art. Their work represents a unified segment of the larger enterprise to understand and illuminate art and will interest anyone who wishes to enlarge their own understanding. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

""One of our most original social thinkers,"" according to the New York Times, Robert Nisbet offers a new approach to sociology. He shows that sociology is indeed an art form, one that has a strong kinship with literature, painting, Romantic history, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, the age in which sociology came into full stature. Sociology as an Art Form is an introduction for the initiated and the uninitiated in so-ciology.Nisbet explains the degree to which sociology draws from the same creative impulses, themes and styles (rooted in history), and actual modes of representa-tion found in the arts. He shows how the founding sociologists such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel constructed portraits (of the bourgeois, the worker, and the intellectual) and landscapes (of the masses, the poor, the factory system), all reflecting and contribut-ing to identical portraits and landscapes found in the literature and art of the period. In addition to marking the similarities between sociologists' and artists' efforts to depict motion or movement, Nisbet emphasizes the relation of sociology to the fin de siecle in art and literature, with examples such as alienation, anomie, and degeneration. He creates an elegant, brilliantly reasoned appraisal of sociology's contribution to modern culture.This book will be of interest to sociologists, artists, and anyone interested in how the fields relate to one another.