Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

Culture and Anarchy is one of the central texts of the western intellectual tradition and has helped to shape thinking about the tasks and requirements of culture and civil society. The book is particularly relevant now, however, because it articulates many issues about culture and cultural politics that are being intensely debated today. In the past decade, Culture and Anarchy has been the subject of discussion by both the cultural right and the cultural left, beloved by the one because it asserts the primacy of reason over the anarchy of doing as one likes, and despised by the other because it champions what many liberals consider an elitist model of culture. This new edition of Culture and Anarchy addresses this debate by including specially commissioned essays by Maurice Cowling, Gerald Graff, Samuel Lipman, and Steven Marcus that analyze Arnold's ideas from divergent political and literary perspectives and link them to contemporary concerns over the health of western culture in an increasingly multicultural society. The edition reprints for the first time in unaltered form the original 1869 text of Culture and Anarchy, providing valuable insight into Arnold's authorial intent; it is supplemented by a useful glossary of names, terms, and events and an introduction by Lipman that places Arnold in his time and discusses his initial reception and continuing importance today.

Matthew Arnold was born in Middlesex in 1822, the son of a headmaster of Rugby public school. He was educated at Winchester, Rugby and Oxford, becoming briefly a Fellow before leaving academia for work and travel followed by being appointed an inspector of schools, a post which informed many of his essays and in which he produced a series of trenchant educational reports championing his ideas on culture, society and education until his retirement in 1886. At the same time, he started publishing poetry in 1849, and produced a range of lyric, elegiac, narrative and dramatic verse over the next decade, of which The Scholar Gypsy and Dover Beach are the best-known items. In 1858 he was appointed to the chair of professor of poetry at Oxford, but published only one more volume of poetry himself, in 1867. He turned his attention instead to essays, first in literary criticism (criticism of vernacular literatures being then a new field) then society, politics and culture, and finally, in the 1870s, theology, though the essays frequently range across these disciplines with few separations. Culture and Anarchy, published in 1869, is considered his greatest single work. Matthew Arnold died in 1888.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780300058673
ISBN 10	0300058675
Title	Culture and Anarchy
Author	Matthew Arnold
Series	Rethinking The Western Tradition
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Yale University Press
Year published	1994-04-27
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.