A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein

by Joan Richardson

• ISBN13: 9780521837484
• ISBN10: 0521837480
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-01-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Joan Richardson provides a fascinating and compelling account of the emergence of the quintessential American philosophy: pragmatism. She demonstrates pragmatism's engagement with various branches of the natural sciences and traces the development of Jamesian pragmatism from the late nineteenth century through modernism, following its pointings into the present. Richardson combines strands from America's religious experience with scientific information to offer interpretations that break new ground in literary and cultural history. This book exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary approaches to producing literary criticism. In a series of highly original readings of Edwards, Emerson, William and Henry James, Stevens, and Stein, A Natural History of Pragmatism tracks the interplay of religious motive, scientific speculation, and literature in shaping an American aesthetic. Wide-ranging and bold, this groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of American literature.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
List of abbreviations	p. xvii
Introduction: frontier instances	p. 1
In Jonathan Edwards's room of the idea	p. 24
Emerson's moving pictures	p. 62
William James's feeling of if	p. 98
Henry James's more than rational distortion	p. 137
Wallace Stevens's radiant and productive atmosphere	p. 179
Gertrude Stein, James's Melancthon/a	p. 232
Notes	p. 253
Bibliography	p. 303
Index	p. 316
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