{"title":"Evelyn Barish","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into Evelyn Barish's insightful biographies, perfect for readers who appreciate nuanced portrayals of historical figures. Explore the lives of fascinating individuals with depth and meticulous detail.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"emerson-book-evelyn-barish-9780691067872","title":"Emerson","description":"Evelyn Barish began this book partly to inquire into a silence--Ralph Waldo Emerson's failure to discuss or mourn his father, who died when the boy was seven years old. As she probed the meaning of this loss, she found herself tracing the development of an American prophet, producing a detailed intellectual biography of Emerson's early years up to the writing of Nature. In the process she has painted a vivid picture of American society of the period and of Emerson's unusual family--including his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a brilliant and eccentric woman, who was described by Emerson as spinning at a higher velocity than all the other tops but who also rode around Concord in her shroud! In the years after the death of William Emerson, Mary Moody Emerson came to help her widowed sister-in-law, Ruth, rear her five sons and thus became a deep influence on the young Ralph Waldo. Barish reveals the complexities of the Emersons' family life, the preoccupations with death and questions of sexual identity in the Romantic fantasies that Emerson wrote as a youth, the emotional struggles of his student years at Harvard, and his private study of the unsettling ideas of the skeptical philosopher David Hume. Pursuing a series of small clues, she clears up the obscurity surrounding the crucial breakdown of his health during the vocational crisis of his twenties. Finally, she traces his path out of fear and self-doubt into autonomy, as he overcame crippling grief after the death of his first wife. Barish makes it clear how Emerson the American classic thinker emerged from a welter of conflicts and handicaps previously obscure to us. How did he free himself from the rigor mortis of his own cultural and personal past--from what he called the \"corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College\"--to become the liberator of America from the intellectual shackles of its colonial experience? Her answer redefines Emerson's \"self-reliance\" not in traditional transcendent or idealistic terms but as the result of real life and hard struggle--experience \"passed through the fire of thought.\"  Originally published in 1990.  The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49657965904145,"sku":"GOR013290626","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49809609556241,"sku":"CIN0691067872G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691067872.jpg?v=1750912229"},{"product_id":"double-life-of-paul-de-man-book-evelyn-barish-9780871403261","title":"The Double Life of Paul De Man","description":"Over thirty years after his death in 1983, Paul de Man, a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature, remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure. Deeply influential, de Man and his theory-driven philosophy were so dominant that his passing received front-page coverage, suggesting that a cult hero, if not intellectual rock star, had met an untimely end. Yet in 1988, de Man's reputation was ruined when it was discovered that he had written an anti-Semitic article and worked for a collaborating Belgium newspaper during World War II. Who was he, really, and who had he been? No one knew. Still in shock, few of his followers wanted to find out. Once an admirer, although never a theorist, the biographer Evelyn Barish began her own investigation. Relying on years of original archival work and interviews with over two hundred of de Man's circle of friends and family, most of them now dead, Barish vividly re-creates this collaborationist world of occupied Belgian and France.     Born in 1919 to a rich but tragically unstable family, Paul de Man, a golden boy, was influenced by his uncle Henri de Man, a socialist turned Nazi collaborator who became the de facto Belgian prime minister. By the early 1940s, Paul, while seemingly only a reviewer for Nazi newspapers, was secretly rising in far more important jobs in Belgium's and France's collaborationist regimes.     Postwar, barred from the university, de Man created a publishing house, but stole all its assets; then, facing jail, he fled to New York, abandoning his family (his opportunistic, anti-Semitic writing seemed the least of his crimes). Arriving penniless, he quickly rose again, befriending an entire generation of American writers in New York, including Dwight Macdonald, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Mary McCarthy. Barish sketches de Man's renowned careers at Bard and Yale, as well as the circumstances surrounding his loving-but bigamous-second marriage to former Bard student Patricia Kelley, who created the tranquillity he so lacked.     Juxtaposing this personal story to his meteoric rise through American academia, Barish traces the origins of the philosophical deconstructionism that he later created with Jacques Derrida, showing how de Man attracted followers with his attack on the hypocrisy of society that attempts to cover up the essential alienation of art from the system. While focusing on the biographical facts, this commanding and psychologically probing biography reveals as much about human behavior and the cross-currents of twentieth-century intellectual thought as it does about the man who held an entire generation in his thrall.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49863298711825,"sku":"CIN0871403269G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51472409559313,"sku":"CIN0871403269VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52574789730577,"sku":"GOR005907653","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0871403269.jpg?v=1750787397"},{"product_id":"double-life-of-paul-de-man-book-evelyn-barish-9781631490057","title":"The Double Life of Paul De Man","description":"Over thirty years after his death in 1983, Paul de Man, a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature, remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure. Deeply influential, de Man and his theory-driven philosophy were so dominant that his passing received front-page coverage, suggesting that a cult hero, if not intellectual rock star, had met an untimely end. Yet in 1988, de Man's reputation was ruined when it was discovered that he had written an anti-Semitic article and worked for a collaborating Belgium newspaper during World War II. Who was he, really, and who had he been? No one knew. Still in shock, few of his followers wanted to find out. Once an admirer, although never a theorist, the biographer Evelyn Barish began her own investigation. Relying on years of original archival work and interviews with over two hundred of de Man's circle of friends and family, most of them now dead, Barish vividly re-creates this collaborationist world of occupied Belgian and France.     Born in 1919 to a rich but tragically unstable family, Paul de Man, a golden boy, was influenced by his uncle Henri de Man, a socialist turned Nazi collaborator who became the de facto Belgian prime minister. By the early 1940s, Paul, while seemingly only a reviewer for Nazi newspapers, was secretly rising in far more important jobs in Belgium's and France's collaborationist regimes.     Postwar, barred from the university, de Man created a publishing house, but stole all its assets; then, facing jail, he fled to New York, abandoning his family (his opportunistic, anti-Semitic writing seemed the least of his crimes). Arriving penniless, he quickly rose again, befriending an entire generation of American writers in New York, including Dwight Macdonald, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Mary McCarthy. Barish sketches de Man's renowned careers at Bard and Yale, as well as the circumstances surrounding his loving-but bigamous-second marriage to former Bard student Patricia Kelley, who created the tranquillity he so lacked.     Juxtaposing this personal story to his meteoric rise through American academia, Barish traces the origins of the philosophical deconstructionism that he later created with Jacques Derrida, showing how de Man attracted followers with his attack on the hypocrisy of society that attempts to cover up the \"essential alienation\" of art from \"the system.\" While focusing on the biographical facts, this commanding and psychologically probing biography reveals as much about human behavior and the cross-currents of twentieth-century intellectual thought as it does about the man who held an entire generation in his thrall.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51576312267025,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51576312430865,"sku":"GOR014334569","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52820047397137,"sku":"CIN1631490052VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53026535145745,"sku":"GOR014703652","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53033344729361,"sku":"GOR008819900","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1631490052.jpg?v=1751023599"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-evelyn-barish.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}