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v. 1 ISBN 9781566633222
Description
These first two volumes of a projected five, in preparation for several years, begin a major publishing venture, collecting the complete essays of one of the giants of modern English prose and of social commentary in our time. The first two volumes span the most productive period of Huxley's career. Volume I begins with his essays for Gilbert Murray's Athenaeum and his music essays for the New Westminster Gazette. Volume II continues through the 1920s and includes his controversial essays on India and the empire in "Jesting Pilate." The essays of both volumes range from nuanced assessments of art and architecture to political analyses, history, science, religion, and art, and a newly discovered series on music. Wide-ranging, allusive, and witty, they are informed by the probing skepticism of a highly educated and ironically incisive member of the English upper middle class. Huxley's fascination with the codes and conventions of European culture, his growing apprehensions about the menacing collapse of the European political order, and his awareness of the impact of science and technology on the post-Versailles world of England, France, Germany, and the United States form the basis for his critique. His subjects overlap with the satirical novels he wrote during the period between the wars, culminating in Point Counter Point and Brave New World. At their best, these essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature.
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v. 3 ISBN 9781566633475
Description
This third volume of a projected six reinforces Huxley’s stature as one of the most acute and informed observers of the social and ideological trends of the years between the world wars. It contains the important collection of essays "Music at Night" as well as the majority of Huxley’s journalistic writing for the Hearst newspapers in the United States and for a variety of British periodicals such as Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, the Evening Standard, and Time and Tide. Much of the attraction of the Hearst essays lies in their vivid period detail: references to the raucous voices of Nazi broadcasters, speeches by Roosevelt and Stalin, Soviet five-year plans, and the effects of the Great Depression combine to provide a rich context for Huxley’s increasingly active role in organized pacifism and his sense of standing on the threshold of a new era. The essays of "Music at Night" define this trend as “the New Romanticism,” a celebration of Enlightenment modernity and an excessive faith in instrumental reason and applied science. Huxley was both intrigued by and suspicious of state planning and centralized bureaucratic authority. The essays in Volume III (and the volume to follow) register his growing ambivalence about the role of technocracy and science in an era of experimentation in the concentration of executive and legislative power. At their best, Huxley’s essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature. "He was among the few writers who...played with ideas so freely, so gaily, with such virtuosity, that the responsive reader...was dazzled and excited."—Isaiah Berlin.
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v. 4 ISBN 9781566633949
Description
In this fourth volume of a projected six, Huxley registers his deep misgivings about the course of history in the late 1930s as the world moved toward a second global war. Many of his essays reflect his continuing interest in the conventions of popular culture as well as the philosophy of science and history, particularly as they inform developments in art and politics. But his larger concerns oscillate between empirical science and the particulars of social history, on the one hand, and his need for a grounding of absolute truth that would transcend both. His critique of politics and the prevailing ideologies of fascism and capitalism overlaps with his attempt to locate a foundational truth in a world of change and diversity. He embraced a form of political pacifism that intersected with an increasing attraction to religious quietism and mysticism. And he made a sustained effort to reconcile mystical experience with contemporary theories of physics and the philosophy of science. At their best, Huxley's essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature. "A remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited."-Jeffrey Hart.
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v. 5 ISBN 9781566634410
Description
In this fifth of six volumes in a major publishing enterprise, Huxley continues to explore the role of science and technology in modern culture, and seeks a final level of foundational Truth that might provide the basis for his growing interest in religious mysticism. His philosophy of history took its final form in this period. At their best, Huxley's essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature. "A remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited."-Jeffrey Hart. "He writes with an easy assurance and a command of classical and modern cross-references,"-Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times. "There is much to enjoy in these volumes...they are important as a document of his times, and of a window on to a stage in the evolution of his mind."-Economist. "You have to marvel at the range of [Huxley's] interests and the intelligence with which he explores them....What we experience in this high journalism is a man of intelligence, sensibility, and formidable erudition engaging his era and struggling for equilibrium while sharing the widespread perception that something ghastly has happened to European civilization...."-Washington Times
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v. 6 ISBN 9781566634649
Description
This sixth and concluding volume of Huxley's essays brings to completion what critics have applauded as "a remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited" (Jeffrey Hart). Here the reader will find Huxley's final assessment of modern society. Revisiting the issues that informed his utopian nightmare, Brave New World, he addresses a broad range of contemporary topics, from ecology, sociobiology, and psychology to politics, history, and religion. His concern with the problems of modernity is everywhere evident. This volume includes his final meditation on art and religion ("Shakespeare and Religion") as well as two recently discovered essays on science, technology, and "modern life." Volume VI also marks Huxley's intervention in the C. P. Snow / F. R. Leavis controversy of the "two cultures." The relationship between science and humanistic culture was a vigorously contended issue in the early 1960s, drawing writers like Lionel Trilling and scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer into the debate. Huxley's response was Literature and Science, his last book and a summation of his theory of art and culture. As one of the last of the modernist public intellectuals, his essays comprise a refiguration of modern cultural history in all its manifestations.
by "Nielsen BookData"
