The long period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century supplied numerous sources for Kierkegaard's thought in any number of different fields. The present, rather heterogeneous volume covers the long period from the birth of Savonarola in 1452 through the beginning of the nineteenth century and into Kierkegaard's own time. The Danish thinker read authors representing vastly different traditions and time periods. Moreover, he also read a diverse range of genres. His interests concerned not just philosophy, theology and literature but also drama and music. The present volume consists of three tomes that are intended to cover Kierkegaard's sources in these different fields of thought. Tome III covers the sources that are relevant for literature, drama and music. Kierkegaard was well read in the European literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He was captivated by the figure of Cervantes' Don Quixote, who is used as a model for humor and irony. He also enjoyed French literature, represented here by articles on Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Mérimée. French dramatists were popular on the Danish stage, and Kierkegaard demonstrated an interest in, among others, Moliére and Scribe. Although he never possessed strong English skills, this did not prevent him from familiarizing himself with English literature, primarily with the help of German translations. While there is an established body of secondary material on Kierkegaard's relation to Shakespeare, little has been said about his use of the Irish dramatist Sheridan. It is obvious from, among other things, The Concept of Irony that Kierkegaard knew in detail the works of some of the main writers of the German Romantic movement. However, his use of the leading figures of the British Romantic movement, Byron and Shelley, remains largely unexplored terrain. The classic Danish authors of the eighteenth century, Holberg, Wessel and Ewald, were influential figures who prepared the way for the Golden Age of Danish poetry. Kierkegaard constantly refers to their dramatic characters, whom he often employs to illustrate a philosophical idea with a pregnant example or turn of phrase. Finally, while Kierkegaard is not an obvious name in musicology, his analysis of Mozart's Don Giovanni shows that he had a keen interest in music on many different levels.

The first volume of a two-volume intellectual biography of Auguste Comte, the founder of modern sociology and positivism.

This book, first published in 1987, complements the author's earlier volume on Culture and Society in France 1848-1898. It deals with the interaction of social history and cultural history, covering in succession the Revolutionary period, the Napoleonic Empire, the Restoration and the July Monarchy. The scope of the book embraces literature (the drama, poetry and the novel), the art of the Revolution and of Romanticism, and to a lesser extent music (including the opera), sculpture and architecture. Influential figures such as Jacques-Louis David, Stendhal, Berlioz, Victor Hugo and others have their place in the survey, together with others prominent in their time hut less well known today. Attention is drawn to phenomena such as the rise of the commercial theatre, and the assembling under Napoleon's aegis of the first public art gallery in Europe, the Musée du Louvre. The survey brings together all the disparate strands to present a coherent picture of the cultural life of France as it evolved during the sixty momentous years between the French Revolution and the upheaval of 1848.

This 1975 text is a survey of French Catholic thought during a period of marked spiritual and intellectual revival, delimited roughly by the Napoleonic Concordat with the Vatican in 1802 and the Separation Law of 1905. The author studies many diverse writers in detail and analyses in characteristically lucid manner the distinctive contribution to French intellectual life in this 'second grand siècle'. Dr Reardon examines too the major trends in French Catholic thought, and concludes that in the nineteenth century there was a recurring tension between liberalism and tradition; between the poles of a secular and even agnostic humanism, and a rigid ultramontanism. The approach is non-technical, an the book will be of considerable interest to a wide variety of readers, both general and specialist. It was the first book in English to cover the development of Catholic thought in France through the whole of the nineteenth century.

Russian literature between 1750 and the romantic age presents a confus ing picture. Various literary movements arose and existed side by side, while new trends made themselves felt. At no other time in the history of Russian literature was there a similar influx of widely disparate literary and intellectual influences from the West. The complex evolution of literature is reflected in the area of literary classification. Period terms have been used in great variety, yet without general agreement as to the extent, or even the nature of the trends described. The essays of this study are devoted to two major literary trends of the 18th and early 19th century, -sentimentalism and preromanticism. They aim to elucidate their evolu tion as well as at defining and describing the conceptual framework on which they rest. Since the 18th century did not draw a sharp line between translated and original literature, both have been included here. Literary, philosophical, and general cultural influences from the West were of consi derable importance for Russian literature. The concepts, motifs and themes which reached Russian writers in translations moulded their own original works. The 18th century witnessed the formation of an adequate literary language which culminated in Karamzin's style. The distinction of two stages in the development of sentimentalism as suggested here and the differentiation between both of them and a third literary trend, preroman ticism, is an attempt to reflect adequately the rapid change in stylistic and poetic norms.