James Seaton is a professor of English at Michigan State University and a literary and cultural critic. He contributed essays and book reviews to The Weekly Standard from 2005 to 2017, covering literature, cultural criticism, and the intersection of politics and the humanities. He is the author of several books on literary and cultural theory, including works on the role of literature in democratic society.
This volume includes 566 letters, less than one-fifth of those that have been preserved, but it seems clear that the ones chosen by the editors are representative. This is not a sanitized selection. A number reveal that Willa Cather (1873-1947) was not always able to transcend the prejudices of her…
In this impressive intellectual biography of one of the founders of modern conservatism, Bradley Birzer makes the case for the importance of Russell Kirk (1918-94) today, in large part by making clear the extent to which Kirk’s philosophical but nonideological kind of conservatism differs from what…
What is fiction for? Bernard Harrison’s answers to the question are the traditional ones long taken for granted by almost all those who care about plays, short stories, and novels. Literature, if it is any good, is "one of the chief engines of self-understanding." At the same time, literature has…
Peter Gay, who died May 12 at the age of 91, had a long and estimable academic career, writing “groundbreaking books on the Enlightenment, the Victorian middle classes, Sigmund Freud, Weimar culture and the cultural situation of Jews in Germany,” according to the New York Times. Unfortunately, his…
Gary Saul Morson is a rarity in American academia. The holder of an endowed chair at Northwestern University and winner of prestigious literary awards such as the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association nevertheless admits publicly that he most often turns to…
This will undoubtedly serve as the standard work on Stephen Crane’s life for many years. Paul Sorrentino was one of the first scholars to reveal the many inaccuracies of Thomas Beer’s 1923 biography, which was entertaining enough but thoroughly unreliable. John Berryman and R. W. Stallman wrote…
The importance of the Midwest to American and even world history is, one would think, obvious and uncontroversial. Jon Lauck points out that in the decades after the American Revolution, the Midwest “proved to those who were skeptical that this republic could expand and that republican sentiments…
The indisputable achievement of American society in the second half of the 20th century was surely the ending of legally authorized discrimination against African Americans. Among the overwhelming majority of Americans who glory in this achievement, however, there is a not-inconsiderable number who…
Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) was the first novel by an African American to become a bestseller and the first selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. And until the rise of Toni Morrison and other black women writers, Wright was widely considered the leading African-American author, while…
Until quite recently it was generally believed in the West that an acquaintance with the ancient classics was the mark of a civilized individual, one whose personal views were grounded in the moral and cultural norms of a long tradition.
Literature and the
The Southern Critics
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Law and Literature
The Frankfurt School in Exile
Lionel Trilling
The Liberal Imagination
Benjamin Franklin and
The Letters of George Santayana
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s
The World Is a Text
The 20th anniversary of the publication of The Closing of the American Mind is a good time to ask whether Allan Bloom's bestseller was a book of its moment, or a work of permanent significance.
The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather
Inventing English
Cosmopolitanism
Darwinian Conservatism
Edmund Wilson