Bøger af Lionel Gossman

"With an online portfolio of 280 images."

This is print on demand publication. Though Theodor Mommsen was probably unaware of it, from the time of the first appearance of his influential and successful "Romische Geschichte" (1854), he was the object of the passionate and enduring hatred of an obscure Swiss philologist in the provincial city of Basle. Johann Jacob Bachofen is still not well known in the English-speaking world. He receives a brief mention in most histories of anthropology for his contribution to the popular 19th-cent. theory of "matriarchy," and his studies of relations in matrilinear societies. Classical scholars know of Bachofen's original contributions to the study of Greek myth and tragedy through George Thomson, whose interpretation of Athenian tragedy owes much to Bachofen.

This is a print on demand publication. Gossman maintains that underlying the argument that historiography cannot be subsumed under a poetics or a rhetoric (in the sense of a system of purely linguistic or literary tropes) is a larger claim, namely that a wide range of activities, from literary criticism, through legal debate, theology, ethics, politics, psychology, and medicine to the natural sciences, all constitute rational practices, even if there is considerable variation in the degree of formalism and rigor and in the type of argument most commonly employed in each of these different of fields of inquiry. Hence Gossman emphasizes the practice or process of doing history rather than the product. What appeals to him in the idea of reason as a practice is its open, liberal, and democratic character. Historiography as a rational practice supposes a community of participants rather than the "anomie" of a world in which every man is his own historian or, at best, the relation of hero and follower that appears to be implied by privileging the historical "text."

In this thought-provoking book, Gossman focuses on Overbeck's "Italia and Germania" to discuss the importance of religious conversion in Romantic thought. Gossman gives excellent translations from original German sources that are not only accurate but may enable the Anglophone reader to truly grasp the spirit of the sources. This book serves as a thoughtful and elegantly written introduction to the way of thinking of one of the most important of the Nazerene painters. It treats the evolution of the Nazarene artists' preoccupation with religious issues in an engaging manner and offers a social-historical and theological context to Overbeck's painting by looking interestingly at a wide range of issues and contacts in his early Nazarene period. Illus.

"In view of the value placed in Scotland on education, reading, and self-improvement and the enterprise and inventiveness with which the inhabitants of the far poorer northern kingdom responded to the opportunities opened up to them by the Union with England, it is not surprising that Scotsmen were heavily represented in the printing and publishing trades. An altogether disproportionate number of the great publishing houses of the English-speaking world, whose names were to become household words - Blackie, Blackwood, Collins, Constable, Macmillan, Millar, Murray, Nelson, Smith and Elder, Strahan -- were founded by men, often enough of quite humble origin, from "north of the border."--

Even in certain of Moliere's own works, in fact, the comic vision shades into something close to Romantic irony.

Although Sainte-Palaye had a surprising influence on the literature and historiography of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-in France, England, and Germany-eighteenth-century medievalism, Gossman argues, is best understood not as anticipation of things to come but as part of a complex of ideas and feelings peculiar to the Enlightenment itself.

Respected by his peers and hugely successful internationally in his own time, Andre Maurois is now hardly read. Moderate and conciliatory in everything, including his literary style, he appealed to the educated reader of his time, but did those very qualities prevent him from achieving lasting distinction and impact?

One of a small number of historical texts that have become classics, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire demands and deserves the kind of attention readers habitually grant to the classics of fictional literature. In Lionel Gossman's thematic and rhetorical study of Gibbon's masterpiece, the foundation of authority is seen as the historian's chief concern.

This work tells the story of 19th century Basel, this seemingly anachronistic hybrid of commercialism and classical republicanism, and of four thinkers who retreated there: Jacob Burckhardt, Johann Jakob Bachofen, Franz Overbeck and Nietzsche. It gives an analytical biography of these figures.