{"title":"Joseph M Levine","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"between-the-ancients-and-moderns-book-joseph-m-levine-9780300079142","title":"Between the Ancients and Moderns","description":"The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns was an old dispute when it was resumed with special ferocity in the later seventeenth century as writers and artists, their friends and patrons, debated how far to imitate the classics and how far to risk the freedom to innovate. In this book Joseph M. Levine argues that it was this tension that gave unity to the cultural life of the period and helped define its baroque character. He also asserts that, contrary to public opinion, neither side won—even as modern superiority was being proclaimed in philosophy and the sciences, the precedence of the ancients was being reaffirmed in literature and the arts.  Levine offers a nuanced account of the seventeenth-century climate of ideas by examining the careers and intellectual lives of four prominent individuals and setting them among their friends and enemies: diarist John Evelyn; poet, playwright, and critic John Dryden; exiled French aristocrat Sieur de Saint-Evremond; and scientist and architect Christopher Wren. He shows how each of these men began with a self-consciously modern position but after much vacillation ended by accepting a surprising dose of \"anciennete.\" In being among the first to explore these issues, argues Levine, these four men offered a prelude to the Battle of the Books and eighteenth-century neoclassicism. And in their uncertainty and anxiety they may also be seen as anticipating something of the later dilemmas of modernity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49512625537297,"sku":"GOR005335851","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51472617079057,"sku":"GOR014294013","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300079141.jpg?v=1750941187"},{"product_id":"dr-woodward-s-shield-book-joseph-m-levine-9780801499357","title":"Dr. Woodward's Shield","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49779557335313,"sku":"GOR006349816","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801499356.jpg?v=1751107449"},{"product_id":"battle-of-the-books-book-joseph-m-levine-9780801481994","title":"The Battle of the Books","description":"Joseph M. Levine provides a witty and erudite account of one of the most celebrated chapters in English cultural history, the acrimonious quarrel between the \"ancients\" and the \"moderns\" which Jonathan Swift dubbed \"the Battle of the Books.\" The dispute that amused and excited the English world of letters from 1690 until the 1730s was, Levine shows, an installment in the long-standing debate about the relationship of classical learning to modern life.   Levine argues that the debate was fundamentally a quarrel about the rival claims of history and literature concerning the proper way to understand the authors of the past. He skillfully examines how both sides wrote their own brands of history: The moderns, led by Richard Bentley, proposed that the \"modern\" inventions of classical scholarship and archaeology gave them a superior insight into the past; the ancients, marshaled by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, held out for a more direct imitation of antiquity and opposed the new scholarship with all the force of their satire and invective. Levine demonstrates that the ancients and the moderns influenced each other in powerful ways, and had much more in common than they knew. Chronicling a critical episode in the development of modem scholarship, The Battle of the Books illuminates the roots of present-day controversies about the role of the classics in the curriculum and the place of the humanities in education.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51569707680017,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51569707876625,"sku":"CIN0801481996G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53140764819729,"sku":"GOR001960679","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801481996.jpg?v=1758967757"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-joseph-m-levine.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}