BiblioVault - Books about Arnold, Matthew

The Age of Eclecticism

Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815–1885

Christine Bolus-Reichert

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

“The burden of the past” invoked by any discussion of eclecticism is a familiar aspect of modernity, particularly in the history of literature. The Age of Eclecticism: Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815–1885 by Christine Bolus-Reichert aims to reframe that dynamic and to place it in a much broader context by examining the rise of a manifold eclecticism in the nineteenth century. Bolus-Reichert focuses on two broad understandings of eclecticism in the period—one understood as an unreflective embrace of either conflicting beliefs or divergent historical styles, the other a mode of critical engagement that ultimately could lead to a rethinking of the contrast between creation and criticism and of the very idea of the original. She also contributes to the emerging field of transnational Victorian studies and, in doing so, finds a way to talk about a broader, post-Romantic nineteenth-century culture.

By reviving eclecticism as a critical term, Bolus-Reichert historicizes the theoretical language available to us for describing how Victorian culture functioned—in order to make the terrain of Victorian scholarship international and comparative and create a place for the Victorians in the genealogy of postmodernism. The Age of Eclecticism gives Victorianists—and other students of nineteenth-century literature and culture—a new perspective on familiar debates that intersect in crucial ways with issues still relevant to literature in an age of multiculturalism and postmodernism.

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The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold

Volume XI. The Last Word

Matthew Arnold

University of Michigan Press, 1977

Essays on literary criticism, public education, and Irish home rule are included in the final volume of this series

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The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold

Antony H. Harrison

Ohio University Press, 2009

The career of Matthew Arnold as an eminent poet and the preeminent critic of his generation constitutes a remarkable historical spectacle orchestrated by a host of powerful Victorian cultural institutions.

The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold investigates these constructions by situating Arnold’s poetry in a number of contexts that partially shaped it. Such analysis revises our understanding of the formation of the elite (and elitist) male literary-intellectual subject during the 1840s and 1850s, as Arnold attempts self-definition and strives simultaneously to move toward a position of ideological influence upon intellectual institutions that were contested sites of economic, social, and political power in his era.

Antony H. Harrison reopens discussion of selected works by Arnold in order to make visible some of their crucial sociohistorical, intertextual, and political components. Only by doing so can we ultimately view the cultural work of Arnold “steadily and … whole,” and in a fashion that actually eschews this mystifying premise of all Arnoldian inquiry which, by the early twentieth century, had become wholly naturalized in the academy as ideology.

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Matthew Arnold

A Life

Park Honan

Harvard University Press, 1983

Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition

Warren D. Anderson

University of Michigan Press, 1988

To be born into the middle or upper classes of Matthew Arnold's England was in a sense to be born into the classical tradition. The precise contour and uses of the tradition, in Arnold's thought and writing, are the subject of this unique study by Warren D. Anderson. In Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition, Anderson shows how the young poet first experimented with his classical heritage, how he moved toward deep involvement and then withdrew to a more objective position. The author examines Arnold's school and university background, his poetry and later prose, his relationship to Stoicism and Epicureanism. The resulting study is absolutely central to an appreciation of Arnold and to an understanding of the classical foundations of Western literature. It shows clearly and accurately the ways in which the nineteenth century interpreted the fifth century B.C.

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