(DOWNLOAD) "Cosmopolitan Republican Swinburne, The Immersive Poet As Public Moralist." by Victorian Poetry # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Cosmopolitan Republican Swinburne, The Immersive Poet As Public Moralist.
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 238 KB
Description
"Rooted cosmopolitanisnm," a paradoxical concept that gained currency in the 1990s, has recently garnered revived attention as theorists address the shortcomings apparent in cosmopolitanism more conventionally conceived--for instance, its inclination to think in idealized universal terms, or its potential disregard for local alliances and gravitation toward detachment and privileged immunity. (1) Kwame Anthony Appiah, for instance, presents rooted or partial cosmopolitanism as a negotiative social practice that balances the need both to honor commitments to the ties of local community and to foster alliances with other nation-states. In evaluating wide-ranging cosmopolitan projects, Appiah consciously rejects humanism's generalizations and erasures of difference, celebrates diverse views, and believes that "sometimes it is the differences we bring to the table that make it rewarding to interact at all." (2) Recognizing moral values as social, not individual, he emphasizes the importance of imaginative engagement and conversation as crucial supplements to abstract theory. (3) For this reason, Appiah treats literary and especially poetic conversation as a powerful ally to moral and political philosophy. (4) Craig Calhoun reminds us that many aims and challenges with which today's cosmopolitans engage were anticipated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (p. 89). In particular, they resonate with those of an ethos that flourished in Britain between the early 1850s and the late 1870s which I shall call "cosmopolitan republicanism." Numbering among their ranks intellectuals of diverse radical and liberal persuasion such as W. J. Linton, Charles Bradlaugh, John Stuart Mill, and John Morley, cosmopolitan republicans focused on the idea of representative government, debating questions of how to balance the welfare of the individual with that of the body politic, and on a wider scale, how to reconcile the interests of an emergent nation with those of a broader, international community. Like rooted cosmopolitans today, cosmopolitan republicans counted poets and novelists among their warmest allies. Among the most colorful and imaginative of these was the poet whose centennial we commemorate, Algernon Charles Swinburne.