The English Mind
Studies in the English Moralists Presented to Basil Willey

Essays planned to constitute the first literary study of the English moralists of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.

Hugh Sykes Davies (Author), George Watson (Author)

9780521137072, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 25 February 2010

312 pages
22.5 x 22.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.6 kg

This is not a random collection of essays, but a book on a single theme. Written by separate hands, mainly by literary critics at Cambridge, it was planned as a whole and executed with a common purpose: to produce the first literary study of the English moralists of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The authors share two convictions: they believe that the study of literature demands an understanding of whatever moral philosophy is embodied in it; and they believe that philosophical writings are capable of being tested by the techniques of literary criticism. In this book, such works as Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Hume's Enquiries are viewed as whole works, not as repositories of philosophical propositions, nor as episodes in the history of English thought.

Basil Willey: a tribute Herbert Butterfield
1. Francis Bacon Anne Righter
2. Thomas Hobbes R. L. Brett
3. John Locke and the rhetoric of the Second Treatise Theodore Redpath
4. Shaftesbury's horses of instruction J. B. Broadbent
5. Berkeley and the style of dialogue Donald Davie
6. Joseph Butler George Watson
7. David Hume: reasoning and experience Raymond Williams
8. Radical prose in the late eighteenth century Matthew Hodgart
9. Wordsworth and the empirical philosophers Hugh Sykes Davies
10. Coleridge and the Victorians Graham Hough
11. Newman and the Romantic sensibility John Beer
12. John Stuart Mill Noel Annan
13. Matthew Arnold and the continental idea Heinrich Straumann
14. Joseph Conrad: alienation and commitment Ian Watt
15. English and some Christian traditions John Holloway.

Subject Areas: Educational: English literature [YQE]