Tact : Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain / David Russell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Russell, David, author.

Series:

Princeton scholarship online.

Princeton scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English prose literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English prose literature.

Aesthetics in literature.

Essay.

Tact.

Social values in literature.

Milner, Marion, 1900-1998--Psychoanalysis.

Milner, Marion.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (215 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in complex modern conditions. In this book, David Russell traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic.Russell argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. He shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom-an "aesthetic liberalism"-not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. Russell demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made.Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: An Art of Handling

"Our Debt to Lamb": The Romantic Essay and the Emergence of Tact

Aesthetic Liberalism: John Stuart Mill as Essayist

Teaching Tact: Matthew Arnold and the Function of Criticism

The Grounds of Tact: George Eliot's Rage

Relief Work: Walter Pater's Tact

Tact in Psychoanalysis: Marion Milner

Notes

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2018.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9781400887903

1400887909

OCLC:

1132670516