Tact : aesthetic liberalism and the essay form in nineteenth-century Britain /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Russell, David, 1981 September 27- author.
Imprint:Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2018]
Description:x, 200 pages ; 25 cm
Language:English
Subject:
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11374166
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Varying Form of Title:Aesthetic liberalism and the essay form in nineteenth-century Britain
ISBN:9780691161198
0691161194
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:"The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in complex modern conditions. In this book, David Russell traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic. Russell argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. He shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom -- an "aesthetic liberalism"--Not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. Russell demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made. Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D.W. Winnicott and Marion Milner."--
Review by Choice Review

Russell (Univ. of Oxford, UK) traces the evolution of essays that utilize an approach he calls tact, a way of experiencing and describing the world without pigeonholing it. The essayists surveyed include Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. The volume is carefully researched and engagingly written throughout--it is a must-read for any serious practitioner or scholar of the personal essay--but the most interesting of the six chapters are easily the first two, which look at Lamb and Mill. Lamb's peculiar approach to assaying early-19th-century London is so obvious a forerunner to today's first-person feature writing that graduate programs in creative nonfiction should drop everything on this semester's syllabus to read this chapter and then every essay that Lamb wrote. Chapter 2 stands out for Russell's insistence on reading Mill's mature work (e.g., On Liberty) alongside his earlier, more spirited work on aesthetics. Russell shows how, as a young man, Mill rejected the utilitarianism of his father, James Mill, and of his teacher, Jeremy Bentham, for a more humane mode of liberalism that sought to combine politics with poetry. This book is an excellent companion to Phillip Lopate's anthology The Art of the Personal Essay (CH, Oct'94, 32-0726). Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Michael W. Cox, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown (UPJ)

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review