The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of "the literary" has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognized as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. This short but thought-provoking volume asks the question, "What is it that tragedy makes us know?" The focus is on tragedy as a mode of representing the experience of radical suffering, pain, or loss, a mode of narrative through which we come to know certain things about ourselves and our world--about its fragility and ours. Through a mixture of historical discussion and close reading of a number of dramatic texts--from Sophocles to Sarah Kane--the book addresses a wide range of debates: how tragedy is defined, whether there is such a thing as "absolute tragedy," various modern attempts to rework the classical heritage and the relation of comedy to tragedy. There is also a fresh discussion of whether religious--particularly Christian--discourse is inimical to the tragic and of the necessary tension between tragic narrative and certain kinds of political as well as religious rhetoric. Rowan Williams argues that tragic drama both articulates failure and frailty and, in affirming the possibility of narrating the story of traumatic loss, refuses to settle for passivity, resignation, or despair. In this sense, it still shows the trace of its ritual and religious roots. And in challenging two-dimensional models of society, power, humanity and human knowing, it remains an intrinsic part of any fully humanist culture.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. This short but thought-provoking volume asks the question 'What is it that tragedy makes us know?'. The focus is on tragedy as a mode of representing the experience of radical suffering, pain, or loss, a mode of narrative through which we come to know certain things about ourselves and our world—about its fragility and ours. Through a mixture of historical discussion and close reading of a number of dramatic texts—from Sophocles to Sarah Kane—the book addresses a wide range of debates: how tragedy is defined, whether there is such a thing as 'absolute tragedy', various modern attempts to rework the classical heritage and the relation of comedy to tragedy. There is also a fresh discussion of whether religious—particularly Christian—discourse is inimical to the tragic, and of the necessary tension between tragic narrative and certain kinds of political as well as religious rhetoric. Rowan Williams argues that tragic drama both articulates failure and frailty and, in affirming the possibility of narrating the story of traumatic loss, refuses to settle for passivity, resignation, or despair. In this sense, it still shows the trace of its ritual and religious roots. And in challenging two-dimensional models of society, power, humanity and human knowing, it remains an intrinsic part of any fully humanist culture.

What is the “tragic imagination”? And what role does it play in the works of William Shakespeare and Ralph Waldo Emerson? Explaining the tragic imagination as a creative faculty employed to answer the perennial Riddle of the Sphinx – a theory of the world that advances human freedom and dignity in the face of historical injustice, cruelty and violence – Andy Amato seeks to recover and rehabilitate this concept by revealing its significance to both key works of philosophy and literature and our contemporary world. This book begins with a close and careful reading of Emerson's first major work, Nature, in conversation with nineteenth and 20thcentury continental philosophy, critical theory and post-structuralism. Uncovering neglected elements of Emerson's philosophy, beyond his reputation as the philosopher of 'cheer', this book explores how Emersonian transcendentalism affirms rather than denies the tragic sense of life – “tragic idealism” – and makes a substantial contribution to philosophy's perpetual endeavour to solve the Riddle. In the second part of the book, Amato then employs Emerson's theoretical lens to interpret Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear. In doing so, he innovatively reframes the central themes of suffering, vision, nature, nothing, foolishness and silence toward achieving liberation. By pairing these two giants of literature and philosophy, The Tragic Imagination in Shakespeare and Emerson not only offers fresh interpretations of Nature and King Lear, but also makes the case for the renewed deployment of tragic imagination, in creative redress, to our current social-political situation.

The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitations of Timon of Athens. The aim is to resist homogenising the plays but to recognise and explore the unique imaginative enterprise from which they arose.

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Naomi Weiss demonstrates that Euripides’ allusions to music-making are not just metatheatrical flourishes or gestures towards musical and religious practices external to the drama but closely interwoven with the dramatic plot. Situating Euripides’ experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousike within a broader cultural context, she shows how much of his novelty lies in his reinvention of traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage. If we wish to understand better the trajectories of this most important ancient art form, The Music of Tragedy argues, we must pay closer attention to the role played by both music and text.

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

Beloved characters Hoot and Olive return in this beautiful picture book from Jonathan D. Voss about imagination, rainy day adventures, and the spirit of friendship. Olive is a little girl with a big, bright imagination. Hoot is her stuffed-animal owl...and her best friend. The two love adventures of all sorts. But on the rainiest of days, there is only one thing to do: stay inside and imagine a whole new world. Just as they’re about to begin their adventure, Hoot makes a shocking discovery—his imagination is broken! Like the best of best friends, Olive comes up with some ideas to help him. But nothing is working: not the head unscrambler, the earmuffs, or the hypnosis. Just as the two are about to give up, Olive remembers the secret ingredient to imagination, and they give it one more try. Fans of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin, George and Martha, and Frog and Toad are certain to fall in love with the next adventure in the Hoot & Olive series, Imagine That.

Five books of essays in one volume from the Booker Prize–winner and “one of the most ambitious and divisive political essayists of her generation” (The Washington Post). With a new introduction by Arundhati Roy, this new collection begins with her pathbreaking book The Cost of Living—published soon after she won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things—in which she forcefully condemned India’s nuclear tests and its construction of enormous dam projects that continue to displace countless people from their homes and communities. The End of Imagination also includes her nonfiction works Power Politics, War Talk, Public Power in the Age of Empire, and An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, which include her widely circulated and inspiring writings on the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the need to confront corporate power, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions globally. Praise for Arundhati Roy “The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” —Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and recipient of the LennonOno Grant for Peace Award “Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays.” —Howard Zinn, author of Political Awakenings and Indispensable Zinn “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness. And in these extraordinary essays—which are clarions for justice, for witness, for a true humanity—Roy is at her absolute best.” —Junot Díaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao “One of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.” —Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and The Battle For Paradise “Arundhati Roy calls for ‘factual precision’ alongside of the ‘real precision of poetry.’ Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach.” —Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects “India’s most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence.” —The New York Times

Play dates, soccer practice, day care, political correctness, drudgery without facts, television, video games, constant supervision, endless distractions: these and other insidious trends in child rearing and education are now the hallmarks of childhood. As author Anthony Esolen demonstrates in this elegantly written, often wickedly funny book, almost everything we are doing to children now constricts their imaginations, usually to serve the ulterior motives of the constrictors. Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child takes square aim at these accelerating trends, in a bitingly witty style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis, while offering parents—and children—hopeful alternatives. Esolen shows how imagination is snuffed out at practically every turn: in the rearing of children almost exclusively indoors; in the flattening of love to sex education, and sex education to prurience and hygiene; in the loss of traditional childhood games; in the refusal to allow children to organize themselves into teams; in the effacing of the glorious differences between the sexes; in the dismissal of the power of memory, which creates the worst of all possible worlds in school—drudgery without even the merit of imparting facts; in the strict separation of the child’s world from the adult’s; and in the denial of the transcendent, which places a low ceiling on the child’s developing spirit and mind. But Esolen doesn’t stop at pointing out the problem; he offers clear solutions as well. With charming stories from his own boyhood and an assist from the master authors and thinkers of the Western tradition, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child is a welcome respite from the overwhelming banality of contemporary culture. Interwoven throughout this indispensable guide to child rearing is a rich tapestry of the literature, music, art, and thought that once enriched the lives of American children. Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child confronts contemporary trends in parenting and schooling by reclaiming lost traditions. This practical, insightful book is essential reading for any parent who cares about the paltry thing that childhood has become, and who wants to give a child something beyond the dull drone of today’s culture.

In this volume, Elizabeth Phillips brings together scholarly essays on eschatology, ethics, and politics, as well as a selection of sermons preached in the chapels of the University of Cambridge arising from that scholarly work. These essays and sermons explore themes ranging from ethnography to Anabaptism and Christian Zionism to Afro-pessimism. Drawing on a wide range of authors from Flannery O’Conner and Herbert McCabe to James Cone and M. Shawn Copeland, this collection provides insight into the fields of Christian ethics and political theology, as well as ethnography and homiletics. Phillips challenges theologians to interdisciplinarity in their work, and to keep historical and traditional sources in conversation with contemporary sources from critical and liberative perspectives. She challenges Christians to engage in apocalyptic practices which name and resist the false pretenses of the political status quo. And she challenges preachers to call their congregations to moral and political faithfulness, opening up possibilities beyond both the squeamish evasion of politics in some preaching traditions and the didactic political partisanship of others.