W i s e b l o o d C l a s s i c s
In order to preserve in print the works of those now-dead custodians of beauty who were foolish enough to spend their lives making great stories that still shock us out of ourselves and open us to things far greater, we are publishing a series of Wiseblood Classics.
Click on the titles below to access our books on Amazon.
NEW WISEBLOOD CLASSICS!
Volume XIX: The Bostonians by Henry James
The rising tide of equality and freedom in America's burgeoning democracy . . . the inherently abstract and therefore often ambiguous quality of freedoms and equalities . . . the persistent presence of a seemingly archaic but ever-perceptive aristocratic perspective . . . With measure and complexity Henry James tackles all of the above in his tragic-comic political novel THE BOSTONIANS. The plot revolves around one of those triangles of desire so familiar in the great works of literature—from Stendhal to Dostoevsky, Katherine Anne Porter to Walker Percy. In THE BOSTONIANS we have Olive, a vehement bohemian humanitarian bent on bringing the young and talented Verena under her influence. Olive's wealth allows the impressionable Verena to become a star lecturer on the radical feminist lecture circuit. Enter Olive's cousin Basil, an ex-Confederate soldier from Mississippi come north to escape poverty and find good work. The "progressive" Olive and the "conservative" Basil vie for Verena amidst a panorama of activists, journalists, and eccentrics as James probes the psychological and political dilemmas of democracy with characteristic detail and acumen. This Wiseblood Classics edition includes excerpts from Tocqueville's DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA that heighten the reader's attentiveness to problems of liberty and servitude, equality and difference.
Volume XVII (Fiction): The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
First published in 1827, The Betrothed introduced a new genre—the historical novel. This was noted by Edgar Allan Poe who, reviewing the classic Italian novel in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, hailed Manzoni's epic as "a work which promises to be the commencement of a new style in novel-writing." Though the novel's centripetal force is the simple story of a betrothed couple whose forthcoming wedding is halted by a lustful noble's dubious designs, Manzoni takes the reader through war, famine, plague, and riot, corrupt prelates and humble priests, as the betrothed thirst for reunification. A panoramic meditation on politics, power, and pain, this novel is above all dramatic proof of love's power—a power that cannot exist without pain.
Renzo determined in an instant that it was better to fly than to stop to justify himself. Rapidly casting his eyes around to see on which side there were the fewest people, and fighting his way through those that opposed him, he soon freed himself from their clutches. The street was deserted before him; but behind him the terrible cry still resounded, “Seize him! stop him! a poisoner!"
-from the novel
Volume Volume XVII (Poetry): Paradise in The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot and Jeremiah Webster
"Jeremiah Webster's brilliant Introduction leaves no doubt about Eliot's relevance for a new generation of readers."
-Lee Oser, author of T.S. Eliot and American Poetry and The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Becket.
Dr Webster’s introduction offers compelling reasons for experienced readers to revisit Eliot, and powerful incentives for new readers to explore the landscape of this immeasurably influential artist.
-Dr. E Victor Bobb, Whitworth University
. . . Eliot's poetry deserves a new readership. As the United States continues to seek departed nymphs through the incantations of technology, as moral impotence becomes the norm, the jeremiad voice of The Waste Land is a much needed corrective; its pessimism may in fact be the best prescription for our time. Eliot's critique of Victorian decay, of the bankruptcy of empire, "Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal," is a necessary rejoinder for a generation still trying to maintain a Post-WWII “American Dream.” As prosperity becomes increasingly mirage-like in the Twenty First Century, as decadence begets debt, as shalom is pursued through duplicitous governance and predator drones, the poem's final lamentation, "Shantih, Shantih, Shantih," is an apt benediction for our age. To survey this "heap of broken images" as Eliot so courageously does, is to recognize that all is not well, that unless there is revelation, "the sound of water over a rock," unless we are able to answer, "Who is the third who walks always beside you?," there is little reason for hope.
-From the Introduction by Jeremiah Webster
Volume XVI: The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky
FROM THE INTRODUCTION by Joshua Hren . . .
In three months we will have been abroad two years. In my opinion it's worse than being exiled in Siberia
-Dostoevsky to S.A. Ivanova, Florence, 1869
Dostoevsky wrote The Eternal Husband during the same period he began The Life of a Great Sinner (later to become The Brothers Karamazov). During this season Dostoevsky complained to an acquaintance, asking “How can I write when I'm hungry, when in order to get two thalers for the telegram, I pawned my trousers? But after all, she is feeding a child, what if she herself goes to pawn her last warm woolen petticoat. And this is the second day now we've had snow (I'm not lying, check the papers!).” With some struggle the author garnered an advance of 100 rubles from the editors of Dawn, where The Eternal Husband was to be published the next year, 1870.
At this point in his life the former Siberian prisoner had already completed Notes From Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot. Although Dostoevsky could correctly inform his friend Strakhov that “to this day I have not learned to master my means. A Multitude of separate novels and tales are compressed together into one, so that there is neither measure nor harmony . . .” The Eternal Husband is, in the words of the great Russian critic Konstantin Mochulsky, “a chef-d'oeuvre of Russian narrative art . . . The composition satisfies all the rules of classical poetics (exposition, complication, rising action, culmination, catastrophe, denouement, epilogue) the episodes are apportioned according to a strict plan, the details seem to be measured out in advance.” Far from the romanticized bohemian starving artist, the literally impoverished writer, depressed by The Idiot's absolute lack of success (“I feel,” he wrote “that compared with Crime and Punishment, The Idiot's effect on the public has been weaker. And consequently all my amour-propre has been aroused”), wrote his most artistically symmetrical, structurally beautiful tale. Further, as the remarkable Dostoevsky translator Richard Pevear notes, “The more spectacular ideological elements of Dostoevsky's work, such as the polemical monologue of the man from underground or the 'poem' of the Grand Inquisitor, which have drawn so much commentary from critics and philosophers, are entirely absent from The Eternal Husband. They are not of its essence, then. What is of the essence, of his 'usual essence,' is the mechanism of metaphysical rivalry and deviated transcendence. Which is portrayed here in its purest form, as a kind of duel, almost a prizefight, its rounds signified by the ringing of bells.”
Answering a late-night knock at the door, a man finds himself face to face with the husband of a former lover. But he is stunned by an awful question: does the husband know of the affair? The story's antimony is embodied in the eternal husband's conflict with the eternal lover. These two rivals, these deep enemies, are paradoxically similar. Unable to tolerate one another, neither can they do without one another. This is in part because, as René Girard observes in his indispensable Resurrection From the Underground, “In The Eternal Husband the wife is dead, the object desired has disappeared, and the rival remains. The essential character of the obstacle is fully disclosed.” In the husband's eyes, because the lover fooled and ridiculed him thoroughly he contains the essence of seduction, an essence he finds absent in himself. The husband thus seeks to make himself the companion, emulator, and rival of his opponent, and we soon find that “the most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings.”
Volume XV: Family Happiness by Lev Tolstoi (Tolstoy)
From the depths of Tolstoy’s experiences and from the standards of his heart comes the story Family Happiness, in which he explores the nature of happiness through the relationship between Sergey Mikhailich and Marya Alexandrovna. However, unlike the story of Sergey and Masha, Tolstoy’s courtship to Valerya Arseneva ended in his own withdrawal. He never married her. His ideal of a happy married life did not come to fruition. His failure did, however, lead to a poignant, timeless story about two lovers who reach a state of married happiness, lose it, try to find—do find—a replacement in the pseudo-contentment of society, and finally carve out an authentic definition of family happiness. Through the sensitive eyes of young Masha, the reader delves into an intimate view of love, happiness, and the trouble that accompanies all human bliss.
-from the Introduction by Amy Krohn, author of forthcoming Wiseblood collection A Flower in the Heart of the Painting*
*Amy's novella A Portrait of Love and Happiness, a major portion of the forthcoming collection, is a retelling of Tolstoi's great work.
Volume XIV: The Princess Casamassima by Henry James
There are degrees of feeling—the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete, in a word—the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. It is those moved in this latter fashion who ‘get most’ out of all that happens to them and who in so doing enable us, as readers of their record, as participators by a fond attention, also to get most. Their being finely aware—as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware--makes absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense to what befalls them.
-Henry James on protagonist Hyacinth Robinson
The Princess Casamassima is the story of a brilliant, tormented young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in radical politics and a terrorist assassination plot. Brought up in poverty, Hyacinth possesses a heightened aesthetic sensitivity that makes the suffering and squalor around him even more reprehensible. Soon after he commits himself to terrorist action, he meets the Princess Casamassima, and her beauty, her aristocratic, wealthy world, bring him to doubt his former faith in radical politics. Unlike the rest of James' novels, The Princess Casamassima deals directly with a violent political subject, a subject intimately familiar to us today. This Wiseblood Classics edition includes Henry James' 1908 Preface to the New York Edition.
Volume XIII: Discovering the Detectives: Three Mystery Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
“That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
Before Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, before G.K. Chesterton's detective-priest Father Brown, before Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, came Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. In these three tales—“The Purloined Letter,” "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt"—we witness the birth of the modern detective story, containing as they do all the major tropes of mystery fiction: the ingenious but eccentric detective, the less-than-sharp constabulary, the incompetent police as foil to the detectives. Poe defines Dupin's method, ratiocination, using the example of a card player: "the extent of information obtained; lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation." Sparing no qualms over hyperbole, Poe's biographer Jeffrey Meyers sums up the significance of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" as follows: "[it] changed the history of world literature,” and in more recent times French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida engaged in a lively debate over the nature of desire that used “The Purloined Letter” as its point of reference. Here Poe invites us to move beyond the sensational element of crime and join the detectives as we discover the culprits—and ourselves.
Volume XII: O Pioneers by Willa Cather
"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years."
-Willa Cather, O Pioneers!*
With O Pioneers!, the first novel of The Great Plains Trilogy, Willa Cather proved her fierce and humble talent. A tale of the Nebraskan prairie land as encountered by Swedish, Czech, French, and Bohemian immigrants, Cather's novel is an epic that traces a family of stubborn American pioneers as they wrestle with, and--in some cases--are defeated by, the plains.
Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson inherits her father's farm and must morph it from raw prairie into a prosperous enterprise. Bergson is the first of Cather's great heroines, but the land, or, as Cather calls it, the "wild land," is also an immensely important character. In O Pioneers! descriptions of the land are so evocative, lush, and moving that they provoked writer Rebecca West to say of her: "The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us."
Volume XI: Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men by G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) wrote nearly one hundred books in thirty-five years. His writing is both uncannily lucid and filled with the most provocative paradoxes. Chesterton wrote this literary biography as a defense of, homage to, and hospitable criticism of Charles Dickens. As with almost everything he wrote, CHARLES DICKENS: THE LAST OF THE GREAT MEN bursts with brilliant, tangential musings on all things.
From the text:
The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant: and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled. But this at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. . . And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.
Volume X: City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings
Milo Milton Hastings (1884-1957) was an American author, inventor, and cigarette-smoking nutritionist. Many believe that his most memorable novel, City of Endless Night, exercised a direct influence on Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang's infamous science fiction film. In City of Endless Night Hasting anticipates the resurgence of Germany and its tilt toward fascism. In the words of science fiction critic Sam Moskowitz, "On all counts of inventiveness, social significance, narrative flow and intrinsic worth, [City . . . ] ranks with When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells, Messiah of the Cylinder by Victor Rousseau and We by Eugene Zamiatin, all written and published about the same period." The "city of night" is Berlin of the year 2041, a Berlin that has become an entirely roofed-in city of sixty levels, sheltering 300,000,000 sun-starved humans. Since 1941 the city has held its ground against the World State, which has worked to bomb it into line innumerable times. Hohenzollerns rule this world with the "graces" of autocratic socialism . . . As the 21st Century gives bountiful evidence that totalitarian dreams and impulses remain forceful, even in liberal democracies, City of Endless Night stands as an indispensable political and psychological investigation.
Volume IX: Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground is a revelatory marvel. Part philosophical investigation, part dramatization, Notes wrestles with everything from enlightened self-interest, determinism, and utopianism to the problem of suffering, all before it explodes into a hyper-conscious man's confrontation with former school friends and, via a prostitute, the limits of self-made redemption and the tragic temptation to make money signify more than it can contain. In writing Notes, Dostoevsky crossed a literary-philosophical threshold. As René Girard writes at the end of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, “In the writing of Notes From Underground Dostoevsky rises for the first time to the level of novelistic revelation. He escapes egotistic indignation and justification; he forgoes the literary fruits of the underground, renounces the 'beautiful and the sublime' of White Nights and ceases to wallow in the misery of Poor Folk. He stops giving the name of involvement or noninvolvement to the fixed distance of fascination. And he describes all the lies of which he is in the process of ridding himself.”
Volume II: The Bureaucrats by Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist whose major achievement is his panoramic series of novels and short stories entitled The Human Comedy. One of the forerunners of literary realism, he influenced innumerable authors, from Dostoevsky to Faulkner. Balzac maintained legendary work habits. After eating a small meal at 5 or 6 in the evening, he woke at midnight and wrote through the morning. In The Bureaucrats Balzac brings his descriptive genius to bear on modern bureaucracy. We follow Rabourdin and his wife as they try to cut the government's size in half while doubling its profits. As soon as their plan slips from secrecy, Rabourdin must face the reactionary schemes of his rival, low-ranking functionaries.
Volume III: Keys to the Bureau: Selected Stories by Gogol, Melville, and Dostoevsky
From the introduction:
“I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course,though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.” So notes the narrator of David Foster Wallace's posthumously published, unfinished novel The Pale King. Inextricably bound to the mundane details that are part and parcel of life as an IRS employee, the narrator goes on to contend that “the underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.” The key is not, the narrator muses, “interpersonal skills,” or “political cunning,” not loyalty, not vision, not “any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for.” The key, finally, is the ability to discover “the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex.” The three stories in this collection—Gogol's “The Mantle,” Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Dostoevsky's “An Unpleasant Predicament”—dramatize and investigate the problems of our bureaucratized world with near-mystical, farcical realism (Gogol), philosophical-comical, doubt/faith-driven fervor (Melville), and the carnivalesque, perceptive powers of satire (Dostoevsky). Nearly two hundred years old, they still hold, for their subject matter is all-too-familiar to us, as David Foster Wallace's Pale King (2011) proves.
Volume IV: The Comedienne by Wladislaw Reymont
Wladislaw Reymont (1867-1925) was a Polish novelist and laureate of the Novel Prize in Literature.
Although The Comedienne is riddled with with comical episodes and the prose constantly points to the uncanny lightness of being human, this is a harrowing novel. Here we witness the metamorphosis of Janina, the young provincial protagonist. After she refuses her domineering father's commands that she mary, she is exiled from her home and town, and quickly enters the world of “the comediennes,” as she joins a Warsaw theatre company. Liberated from her home, she grasps after “freedom,” personal freedom, and Reymont spares us nothing as we behold the free comedienne's fate.
In writing this, his first novel, the author drew heavily on his own experience as a young actor. After he rejected the trade his parents had raised him to pursue, Reymont ran away and joined a theater troupe that took him to Warsaw. There, tasting the world of glamour and fame, he encountered the grim realities that forced him to wrestle with the great Shakespearean distinction between “seems” and “is.”
Volume V: The Little World of the Past by Antonio Fogazzaro
Antonio Fogazzaro (1842-1911) was an Italian novelist. The Little World of the Past is set during a time of massive upheaval and altercation; many Italians are trying to throw off the yoke of occupying Austria. Italy is about to become unified and independent; the 'Risorgimento' is coming. On the surface the story of the novel is somewhat conventional. A pair of young lovers marries against the wishes of a rich grandmother. The young couple, Franco and Luisa, stand for traditional religious observance in Franco's case and enlightened agnosticism in Luisa's. Their opposing views are dramatized by divergent manners of raising their daughter Maria. These young lovers suffer great trials connected to their child, and to their contrary conceptions of faith, to the point that Luisa experiences temporary madness. Like other of the world's great novels, the surface plot serves as a backdrop that allows the author to dramatize profound, perennial political and religious ideas which push the limits of the romantic and reveal truths. Upon its release, this work was highly acclaimed, even by critics unsympathetic to his religious and political positions. In 1941, Italian filmmaker Mario Soldati adapted the novel, and his rendering became one of the first giants of Italian cinema.
Volume VI: The Possessed (Demons) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"'The fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses,' Dostoevsky writes at one point in Demons. The fact remains that for the great Russian novelist art was a. . . function interdependent with the state of the soul."
-George Panichas, THE BURDEN OF VISION
Demons [The Possessed] follows a small circle of revolutionaries who, dissatisfied with the present state of provincial Russia and the wider world, place their faith in radical political theologies with hopes that the structures of society and being can be changed. Dostoevsky's theological anxieties become strikingly manifest in Demons, and the novel gains profundity because Dostoevsky does not combat nihilism by fleeing from it, but by giving it full narrative expression. The novel does not read like a morality tale, even if it portrays the "consequences" or logical practical counterparts of nihilistic philosophies. This moving story of inter-generational tensions, of revolutionaries and criminals, of strong men and underground men, of unbound love and exploited lovers, told by a master psychologist, still has staying power today. This Wiseblood Classic begins with an extensive critical introduction written by Theology and Fiction scholar Joshua Hren, Ph.D.
Volume VII: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls follows the exploits of Chichikov, a middle-class gentleman who arrives unknown in a provincial town and immediately strives to make himself a respectable name by impressing the local officials. Though of limited means, he spends copiously, convinced that an initial display of wealth and power will help him to acquire the connections he needs to live a sumtuous life. Part of his plan to gain stability and status revolves around his absurd and mysterious plan to acquire "dead souls," to purchase dead serfs from landowners in order to trick the tax-collectors in a game of get rich quick.
Vladimir Nabokov contended that Gogol's Dead Souls is predominantly concerned with "poshlust," which, translated imperfectly, means, "cheap, sham, common. . . high flautin, in bad taste." Chichikov is almost an archetype of "poshlust." Described as a golden mean, "a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin. Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young," Chichikov incarnates the peak of false-respectability, pretension, and self-interest. As "Russian" as both the protagonist and the very word and concept of "poshlust" are, and even as the narrative unfolds in a provincial Russian town (so provincial it is known only as N--), Gogol's vision is "catholic" in the literal sense: its revelatory power is universal, soliciting laughter and gasps through his hilariously terrifying portraits. Of Chichikov Professor William Phelps writes that “no one can travel far in America without meeting scores of Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial traveller whose success depends entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature and of the persuasive power of his tongue.” Still further, Chichikov is not simply a caricature of someone other than ourselves. In the interpretive essay included in this Wiseblood Classics edition, William Weathers insists that “Gogol knew that Everyman by becoming a dead soul can find himself in a virtual hell on earth, a village of N--, regardless of place or century. Dead Souls, then, is a great moral statement on your journey and mine through reality, or at least on our condition within reality.”
Volume VIII: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
LORD JIM (1900) is the story of a ship which collides with “a floating derelict” and will doubtlessly “go down at any moment” during a “silent black squall.” The ship, old and rust-eaten, is voyaging across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. Aboard are eight-hundred pilgrims. Terror possesses the captain and several of his officers, who jump, and thus wantonly abandon the sleeping passengers who are unaware of their peril. For the crew members safe in their life-boat, dishonor is better than death.
In the words of the story’s narrator, Captain Marlow, LORD JIM portrays “those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be. . . .” That individual is Jim, who serves as the chief mate of the Patna and who also “jumps.” Recurringly Jim envisions himself as “always an example of devotion to duty and as unflinching as a hero in a book.” But his heroic dream of “saving people from sinking ships . . . ” does not square with what he really represents: one who falls from grace, and whose “crime” is “a breach of faith with the community of mankind.” Jim’s is also the story of a man in search of some form of atonement once he recognizes that his . . . his dream of “the success of his imaginary achievements,” constitute a romantic illusion.
This Wiseblood Classic contains an in-depth critical introduction by George Panichas.
In order to preserve in print the works of those now-dead custodians of beauty who were foolish enough to spend their lives making great stories that still shock us out of ourselves and open us to things far greater, we are publishing a series of Wiseblood Classics.
Click on the titles below to access our books on Amazon.
NEW WISEBLOOD CLASSICS!
Volume XIX: The Bostonians by Henry James
The rising tide of equality and freedom in America's burgeoning democracy . . . the inherently abstract and therefore often ambiguous quality of freedoms and equalities . . . the persistent presence of a seemingly archaic but ever-perceptive aristocratic perspective . . . With measure and complexity Henry James tackles all of the above in his tragic-comic political novel THE BOSTONIANS. The plot revolves around one of those triangles of desire so familiar in the great works of literature—from Stendhal to Dostoevsky, Katherine Anne Porter to Walker Percy. In THE BOSTONIANS we have Olive, a vehement bohemian humanitarian bent on bringing the young and talented Verena under her influence. Olive's wealth allows the impressionable Verena to become a star lecturer on the radical feminist lecture circuit. Enter Olive's cousin Basil, an ex-Confederate soldier from Mississippi come north to escape poverty and find good work. The "progressive" Olive and the "conservative" Basil vie for Verena amidst a panorama of activists, journalists, and eccentrics as James probes the psychological and political dilemmas of democracy with characteristic detail and acumen. This Wiseblood Classics edition includes excerpts from Tocqueville's DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA that heighten the reader's attentiveness to problems of liberty and servitude, equality and difference.
Volume XVII (Fiction): The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
First published in 1827, The Betrothed introduced a new genre—the historical novel. This was noted by Edgar Allan Poe who, reviewing the classic Italian novel in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, hailed Manzoni's epic as "a work which promises to be the commencement of a new style in novel-writing." Though the novel's centripetal force is the simple story of a betrothed couple whose forthcoming wedding is halted by a lustful noble's dubious designs, Manzoni takes the reader through war, famine, plague, and riot, corrupt prelates and humble priests, as the betrothed thirst for reunification. A panoramic meditation on politics, power, and pain, this novel is above all dramatic proof of love's power—a power that cannot exist without pain.
Renzo determined in an instant that it was better to fly than to stop to justify himself. Rapidly casting his eyes around to see on which side there were the fewest people, and fighting his way through those that opposed him, he soon freed himself from their clutches. The street was deserted before him; but behind him the terrible cry still resounded, “Seize him! stop him! a poisoner!"
-from the novel
Volume Volume XVII (Poetry): Paradise in The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot and Jeremiah Webster
"Jeremiah Webster's brilliant Introduction leaves no doubt about Eliot's relevance for a new generation of readers."
-Lee Oser, author of T.S. Eliot and American Poetry and The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Becket.
Dr Webster’s introduction offers compelling reasons for experienced readers to revisit Eliot, and powerful incentives for new readers to explore the landscape of this immeasurably influential artist.
-Dr. E Victor Bobb, Whitworth University
. . . Eliot's poetry deserves a new readership. As the United States continues to seek departed nymphs through the incantations of technology, as moral impotence becomes the norm, the jeremiad voice of The Waste Land is a much needed corrective; its pessimism may in fact be the best prescription for our time. Eliot's critique of Victorian decay, of the bankruptcy of empire, "Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal," is a necessary rejoinder for a generation still trying to maintain a Post-WWII “American Dream.” As prosperity becomes increasingly mirage-like in the Twenty First Century, as decadence begets debt, as shalom is pursued through duplicitous governance and predator drones, the poem's final lamentation, "Shantih, Shantih, Shantih," is an apt benediction for our age. To survey this "heap of broken images" as Eliot so courageously does, is to recognize that all is not well, that unless there is revelation, "the sound of water over a rock," unless we are able to answer, "Who is the third who walks always beside you?," there is little reason for hope.
-From the Introduction by Jeremiah Webster
Volume XVI: The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky
FROM THE INTRODUCTION by Joshua Hren . . .
In three months we will have been abroad two years. In my opinion it's worse than being exiled in Siberia
-Dostoevsky to S.A. Ivanova, Florence, 1869
Dostoevsky wrote The Eternal Husband during the same period he began The Life of a Great Sinner (later to become The Brothers Karamazov). During this season Dostoevsky complained to an acquaintance, asking “How can I write when I'm hungry, when in order to get two thalers for the telegram, I pawned my trousers? But after all, she is feeding a child, what if she herself goes to pawn her last warm woolen petticoat. And this is the second day now we've had snow (I'm not lying, check the papers!).” With some struggle the author garnered an advance of 100 rubles from the editors of Dawn, where The Eternal Husband was to be published the next year, 1870.
At this point in his life the former Siberian prisoner had already completed Notes From Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot. Although Dostoevsky could correctly inform his friend Strakhov that “to this day I have not learned to master my means. A Multitude of separate novels and tales are compressed together into one, so that there is neither measure nor harmony . . .” The Eternal Husband is, in the words of the great Russian critic Konstantin Mochulsky, “a chef-d'oeuvre of Russian narrative art . . . The composition satisfies all the rules of classical poetics (exposition, complication, rising action, culmination, catastrophe, denouement, epilogue) the episodes are apportioned according to a strict plan, the details seem to be measured out in advance.” Far from the romanticized bohemian starving artist, the literally impoverished writer, depressed by The Idiot's absolute lack of success (“I feel,” he wrote “that compared with Crime and Punishment, The Idiot's effect on the public has been weaker. And consequently all my amour-propre has been aroused”), wrote his most artistically symmetrical, structurally beautiful tale. Further, as the remarkable Dostoevsky translator Richard Pevear notes, “The more spectacular ideological elements of Dostoevsky's work, such as the polemical monologue of the man from underground or the 'poem' of the Grand Inquisitor, which have drawn so much commentary from critics and philosophers, are entirely absent from The Eternal Husband. They are not of its essence, then. What is of the essence, of his 'usual essence,' is the mechanism of metaphysical rivalry and deviated transcendence. Which is portrayed here in its purest form, as a kind of duel, almost a prizefight, its rounds signified by the ringing of bells.”
Answering a late-night knock at the door, a man finds himself face to face with the husband of a former lover. But he is stunned by an awful question: does the husband know of the affair? The story's antimony is embodied in the eternal husband's conflict with the eternal lover. These two rivals, these deep enemies, are paradoxically similar. Unable to tolerate one another, neither can they do without one another. This is in part because, as René Girard observes in his indispensable Resurrection From the Underground, “In The Eternal Husband the wife is dead, the object desired has disappeared, and the rival remains. The essential character of the obstacle is fully disclosed.” In the husband's eyes, because the lover fooled and ridiculed him thoroughly he contains the essence of seduction, an essence he finds absent in himself. The husband thus seeks to make himself the companion, emulator, and rival of his opponent, and we soon find that “the most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings.”
Volume XV: Family Happiness by Lev Tolstoi (Tolstoy)
From the depths of Tolstoy’s experiences and from the standards of his heart comes the story Family Happiness, in which he explores the nature of happiness through the relationship between Sergey Mikhailich and Marya Alexandrovna. However, unlike the story of Sergey and Masha, Tolstoy’s courtship to Valerya Arseneva ended in his own withdrawal. He never married her. His ideal of a happy married life did not come to fruition. His failure did, however, lead to a poignant, timeless story about two lovers who reach a state of married happiness, lose it, try to find—do find—a replacement in the pseudo-contentment of society, and finally carve out an authentic definition of family happiness. Through the sensitive eyes of young Masha, the reader delves into an intimate view of love, happiness, and the trouble that accompanies all human bliss.
-from the Introduction by Amy Krohn, author of forthcoming Wiseblood collection A Flower in the Heart of the Painting*
*Amy's novella A Portrait of Love and Happiness, a major portion of the forthcoming collection, is a retelling of Tolstoi's great work.
Volume XIV: The Princess Casamassima by Henry James
There are degrees of feeling—the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete, in a word—the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. It is those moved in this latter fashion who ‘get most’ out of all that happens to them and who in so doing enable us, as readers of their record, as participators by a fond attention, also to get most. Their being finely aware—as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware--makes absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense to what befalls them.
-Henry James on protagonist Hyacinth Robinson
The Princess Casamassima is the story of a brilliant, tormented young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in radical politics and a terrorist assassination plot. Brought up in poverty, Hyacinth possesses a heightened aesthetic sensitivity that makes the suffering and squalor around him even more reprehensible. Soon after he commits himself to terrorist action, he meets the Princess Casamassima, and her beauty, her aristocratic, wealthy world, bring him to doubt his former faith in radical politics. Unlike the rest of James' novels, The Princess Casamassima deals directly with a violent political subject, a subject intimately familiar to us today. This Wiseblood Classics edition includes Henry James' 1908 Preface to the New York Edition.
Volume XIII: Discovering the Detectives: Three Mystery Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
“That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
Before Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, before G.K. Chesterton's detective-priest Father Brown, before Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, came Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. In these three tales—“The Purloined Letter,” "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt"—we witness the birth of the modern detective story, containing as they do all the major tropes of mystery fiction: the ingenious but eccentric detective, the less-than-sharp constabulary, the incompetent police as foil to the detectives. Poe defines Dupin's method, ratiocination, using the example of a card player: "the extent of information obtained; lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation." Sparing no qualms over hyperbole, Poe's biographer Jeffrey Meyers sums up the significance of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" as follows: "[it] changed the history of world literature,” and in more recent times French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida engaged in a lively debate over the nature of desire that used “The Purloined Letter” as its point of reference. Here Poe invites us to move beyond the sensational element of crime and join the detectives as we discover the culprits—and ourselves.
Volume XII: O Pioneers by Willa Cather
"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years."
-Willa Cather, O Pioneers!*
With O Pioneers!, the first novel of The Great Plains Trilogy, Willa Cather proved her fierce and humble talent. A tale of the Nebraskan prairie land as encountered by Swedish, Czech, French, and Bohemian immigrants, Cather's novel is an epic that traces a family of stubborn American pioneers as they wrestle with, and--in some cases--are defeated by, the plains.
Swedish immigrant Alexandra Bergson inherits her father's farm and must morph it from raw prairie into a prosperous enterprise. Bergson is the first of Cather's great heroines, but the land, or, as Cather calls it, the "wild land," is also an immensely important character. In O Pioneers! descriptions of the land are so evocative, lush, and moving that they provoked writer Rebecca West to say of her: "The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us."
Volume XI: Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men by G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) wrote nearly one hundred books in thirty-five years. His writing is both uncannily lucid and filled with the most provocative paradoxes. Chesterton wrote this literary biography as a defense of, homage to, and hospitable criticism of Charles Dickens. As with almost everything he wrote, CHARLES DICKENS: THE LAST OF THE GREAT MEN bursts with brilliant, tangential musings on all things.
From the text:
The hour of absinthe is over. We shall not be much further troubled with the little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too clean for their delights. But we have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant: and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled. But this at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. . . And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.
Volume X: City of Endless Night by Milo Hastings
Milo Milton Hastings (1884-1957) was an American author, inventor, and cigarette-smoking nutritionist. Many believe that his most memorable novel, City of Endless Night, exercised a direct influence on Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang's infamous science fiction film. In City of Endless Night Hasting anticipates the resurgence of Germany and its tilt toward fascism. In the words of science fiction critic Sam Moskowitz, "On all counts of inventiveness, social significance, narrative flow and intrinsic worth, [City . . . ] ranks with When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells, Messiah of the Cylinder by Victor Rousseau and We by Eugene Zamiatin, all written and published about the same period." The "city of night" is Berlin of the year 2041, a Berlin that has become an entirely roofed-in city of sixty levels, sheltering 300,000,000 sun-starved humans. Since 1941 the city has held its ground against the World State, which has worked to bomb it into line innumerable times. Hohenzollerns rule this world with the "graces" of autocratic socialism . . . As the 21st Century gives bountiful evidence that totalitarian dreams and impulses remain forceful, even in liberal democracies, City of Endless Night stands as an indispensable political and psychological investigation.
Volume IX: Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground is a revelatory marvel. Part philosophical investigation, part dramatization, Notes wrestles with everything from enlightened self-interest, determinism, and utopianism to the problem of suffering, all before it explodes into a hyper-conscious man's confrontation with former school friends and, via a prostitute, the limits of self-made redemption and the tragic temptation to make money signify more than it can contain. In writing Notes, Dostoevsky crossed a literary-philosophical threshold. As René Girard writes at the end of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, “In the writing of Notes From Underground Dostoevsky rises for the first time to the level of novelistic revelation. He escapes egotistic indignation and justification; he forgoes the literary fruits of the underground, renounces the 'beautiful and the sublime' of White Nights and ceases to wallow in the misery of Poor Folk. He stops giving the name of involvement or noninvolvement to the fixed distance of fascination. And he describes all the lies of which he is in the process of ridding himself.”
Volume II: The Bureaucrats by Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist whose major achievement is his panoramic series of novels and short stories entitled The Human Comedy. One of the forerunners of literary realism, he influenced innumerable authors, from Dostoevsky to Faulkner. Balzac maintained legendary work habits. After eating a small meal at 5 or 6 in the evening, he woke at midnight and wrote through the morning. In The Bureaucrats Balzac brings his descriptive genius to bear on modern bureaucracy. We follow Rabourdin and his wife as they try to cut the government's size in half while doubling its profits. As soon as their plan slips from secrecy, Rabourdin must face the reactionary schemes of his rival, low-ranking functionaries.
Volume III: Keys to the Bureau: Selected Stories by Gogol, Melville, and Dostoevsky
From the introduction:
“I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course,though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.” So notes the narrator of David Foster Wallace's posthumously published, unfinished novel The Pale King. Inextricably bound to the mundane details that are part and parcel of life as an IRS employee, the narrator goes on to contend that “the underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.” The key is not, the narrator muses, “interpersonal skills,” or “political cunning,” not loyalty, not vision, not “any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for.” The key, finally, is the ability to discover “the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex.” The three stories in this collection—Gogol's “The Mantle,” Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Dostoevsky's “An Unpleasant Predicament”—dramatize and investigate the problems of our bureaucratized world with near-mystical, farcical realism (Gogol), philosophical-comical, doubt/faith-driven fervor (Melville), and the carnivalesque, perceptive powers of satire (Dostoevsky). Nearly two hundred years old, they still hold, for their subject matter is all-too-familiar to us, as David Foster Wallace's Pale King (2011) proves.
Volume IV: The Comedienne by Wladislaw Reymont
Wladislaw Reymont (1867-1925) was a Polish novelist and laureate of the Novel Prize in Literature.
Although The Comedienne is riddled with with comical episodes and the prose constantly points to the uncanny lightness of being human, this is a harrowing novel. Here we witness the metamorphosis of Janina, the young provincial protagonist. After she refuses her domineering father's commands that she mary, she is exiled from her home and town, and quickly enters the world of “the comediennes,” as she joins a Warsaw theatre company. Liberated from her home, she grasps after “freedom,” personal freedom, and Reymont spares us nothing as we behold the free comedienne's fate.
In writing this, his first novel, the author drew heavily on his own experience as a young actor. After he rejected the trade his parents had raised him to pursue, Reymont ran away and joined a theater troupe that took him to Warsaw. There, tasting the world of glamour and fame, he encountered the grim realities that forced him to wrestle with the great Shakespearean distinction between “seems” and “is.”
Volume V: The Little World of the Past by Antonio Fogazzaro
Antonio Fogazzaro (1842-1911) was an Italian novelist. The Little World of the Past is set during a time of massive upheaval and altercation; many Italians are trying to throw off the yoke of occupying Austria. Italy is about to become unified and independent; the 'Risorgimento' is coming. On the surface the story of the novel is somewhat conventional. A pair of young lovers marries against the wishes of a rich grandmother. The young couple, Franco and Luisa, stand for traditional religious observance in Franco's case and enlightened agnosticism in Luisa's. Their opposing views are dramatized by divergent manners of raising their daughter Maria. These young lovers suffer great trials connected to their child, and to their contrary conceptions of faith, to the point that Luisa experiences temporary madness. Like other of the world's great novels, the surface plot serves as a backdrop that allows the author to dramatize profound, perennial political and religious ideas which push the limits of the romantic and reveal truths. Upon its release, this work was highly acclaimed, even by critics unsympathetic to his religious and political positions. In 1941, Italian filmmaker Mario Soldati adapted the novel, and his rendering became one of the first giants of Italian cinema.
Volume VI: The Possessed (Demons) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"'The fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses,' Dostoevsky writes at one point in Demons. The fact remains that for the great Russian novelist art was a. . . function interdependent with the state of the soul."
-George Panichas, THE BURDEN OF VISION
Demons [The Possessed] follows a small circle of revolutionaries who, dissatisfied with the present state of provincial Russia and the wider world, place their faith in radical political theologies with hopes that the structures of society and being can be changed. Dostoevsky's theological anxieties become strikingly manifest in Demons, and the novel gains profundity because Dostoevsky does not combat nihilism by fleeing from it, but by giving it full narrative expression. The novel does not read like a morality tale, even if it portrays the "consequences" or logical practical counterparts of nihilistic philosophies. This moving story of inter-generational tensions, of revolutionaries and criminals, of strong men and underground men, of unbound love and exploited lovers, told by a master psychologist, still has staying power today. This Wiseblood Classic begins with an extensive critical introduction written by Theology and Fiction scholar Joshua Hren, Ph.D.
Volume VII: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls follows the exploits of Chichikov, a middle-class gentleman who arrives unknown in a provincial town and immediately strives to make himself a respectable name by impressing the local officials. Though of limited means, he spends copiously, convinced that an initial display of wealth and power will help him to acquire the connections he needs to live a sumtuous life. Part of his plan to gain stability and status revolves around his absurd and mysterious plan to acquire "dead souls," to purchase dead serfs from landowners in order to trick the tax-collectors in a game of get rich quick.
Vladimir Nabokov contended that Gogol's Dead Souls is predominantly concerned with "poshlust," which, translated imperfectly, means, "cheap, sham, common. . . high flautin, in bad taste." Chichikov is almost an archetype of "poshlust." Described as a golden mean, "a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin. Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young," Chichikov incarnates the peak of false-respectability, pretension, and self-interest. As "Russian" as both the protagonist and the very word and concept of "poshlust" are, and even as the narrative unfolds in a provincial Russian town (so provincial it is known only as N--), Gogol's vision is "catholic" in the literal sense: its revelatory power is universal, soliciting laughter and gasps through his hilariously terrifying portraits. Of Chichikov Professor William Phelps writes that “no one can travel far in America without meeting scores of Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial traveller whose success depends entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature and of the persuasive power of his tongue.” Still further, Chichikov is not simply a caricature of someone other than ourselves. In the interpretive essay included in this Wiseblood Classics edition, William Weathers insists that “Gogol knew that Everyman by becoming a dead soul can find himself in a virtual hell on earth, a village of N--, regardless of place or century. Dead Souls, then, is a great moral statement on your journey and mine through reality, or at least on our condition within reality.”
Volume VIII: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
LORD JIM (1900) is the story of a ship which collides with “a floating derelict” and will doubtlessly “go down at any moment” during a “silent black squall.” The ship, old and rust-eaten, is voyaging across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. Aboard are eight-hundred pilgrims. Terror possesses the captain and several of his officers, who jump, and thus wantonly abandon the sleeping passengers who are unaware of their peril. For the crew members safe in their life-boat, dishonor is better than death.
In the words of the story’s narrator, Captain Marlow, LORD JIM portrays “those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be. . . .” That individual is Jim, who serves as the chief mate of the Patna and who also “jumps.” Recurringly Jim envisions himself as “always an example of devotion to duty and as unflinching as a hero in a book.” But his heroic dream of “saving people from sinking ships . . . ” does not square with what he really represents: one who falls from grace, and whose “crime” is “a breach of faith with the community of mankind.” Jim’s is also the story of a man in search of some form of atonement once he recognizes that his . . . his dream of “the success of his imaginary achievements,” constitute a romantic illusion.
This Wiseblood Classic contains an in-depth critical introduction by George Panichas.
Wiseblood Classics of Philosophy
As part of our efforts to resuscitate our impoverished culture, Wiseblood Books is assembling a series of philosophical classics, most of which are rooted in the Western tradition. By making affordable versions of these books available to a new generation, we hope to stimulate thinking and dialogue for the clarification of thought. In the tradition of the Great Books program, we include works whose ideas are often contradictory. Our editors do not personally espouse all of the theories and opinions contained in each volume, but we consider them consequential enough that they merit careful study; the effects of powerful ideas cannot be understated.
Sophist by Plato
". . . imitation is a kind of creation—of images, however, as we affirm, and not of real things."
-The Eleatic Stranger, Plato's SOPHIST
Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, and teacher of Aristotle. In SOPHIST he sets the foundations for investigations—the most famous of which were undertaken thousands of years later by Hegel and Heidegger—into the nature of Being and Not-Being. As he undertakes his formal task, which is to define the nature of the Sophist, and to describe the characteristics of sophistry, Plato grapples with our capacity to know, and the human tendency toward deception. As we read in the extensive critical introduction: "Now the painter is a man who professes to make all things, and children, who see his pictures at a distance, sometimes take them for realities: and the Sophist pretends to know all things, and he, too, can deceive young men, who are still at a distance from the truth, not through their eyes, but through their ears, by the mummery of words, and induce them to believe him. But as they grow older, and come into contact with realities, they learn by experience the futility of his pretensions. The Sophist, then, has not real knowledge; he is only an imitator, or image-maker."
Philosophy of Mind by G.W.F. Hegel
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND sets forth G.W.F. HEGEL's (1770-1831) science of the experience and phenomonlogy of consciousness. This condensed version of PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, which the author created for his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, explores Hegel's grasp of: 1) what mind is 2) the sensibility of the physical soul 3) the immediacy of the feeling soul 4) consciousness and the intellect 5) the theoretical mind 6) memory, intuition, and imagination 7) the morality of conscience 8) moral life, or social ethics 9) revealed religion in the absolute mind, and more. This 1894 translation of the German original, by Scottish philosopher and Oxford University professor WILLIAM WALLACE (1843-1897), remains a favorite of Hegel students, and is celebrated for its eloquence.
The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a philosopher, theologian, satirist, and human being. In THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH Kierkegaard unflinchingly explores the problem of despair, thereby forging a sort of Christian psychology/philosophy of the subject.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION:
Oh, but even if Christ had not awakened Lazarus from the dead, is it not true that this sickness, that death itself, was not a sickness unto death? When Christ comes to the grave and cries with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come forth” (11:43), it is evident enough that “this” sickness is not unto death. But even if Christ had not said these words — merely the fact that He, who is “the resurrection and the life” (11:25), comes to the grave, is not this a sufficient sign that this sickness is not unto death, does not the fact that Christ exists mean that this sickness is not unto death?
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
In his essay “Freudianism and Psychoanalysis,” philosopher Jacques Maritain writes that “Freudian metaphysics contain in their very depths what Max Scheler calls resentment: the resentment of a soul wounded and humiliated from childhood, and which, as it seems, strikes at human nature itself; and especially resentment against all rational, moral, religious regulations, which pretend to conquer the world of instinct, and which in reality augment, in Freud's opinion, man's misfortune and lead to psychic disorders.” Although Maritain finds Freudian metaphysics deeply problematic, he carefully separates out Freudian psychoanalysis which, he contends, establishes Freud as a genius of discovery and investigation. Crucial to the psychoanalytic genius, he writes, is the theory that “a psychic state is determined not only by the foreground—that is, by the object which presents itself to the psychic energy; but it is also determined by the background—that is, by other, earlier states or psychic dispositions of the subject itself. The psychic foreground is both the effect and the sign of these unconscious states and dispositions. It is their 'psychic expression.' This is especially true in the case of psychic products which are not centered in reality: dreams, hallucinations, neurotic symptoms.”
In A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) sets forth his major theories on dream signification, censorship, and interpretation, the psychology of errors, fear and anxiety, transference, neuroses, and more.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon by Karl Marx
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a philosopher, economist, and all-around revolutionary. On the surface, this essay explicates the French coup of 1851, in which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte assumed dictatorial powers. We see Marx emerging as political historian, treating real historical events through the lens of his his materialist conception of history.
This volume should be of interest particularly to those for whom the prospect of reading the daunting Das Kapital is, well, daunting, as herein the reader will become acquainted with many of Marx's foundational theories and ideas, including dialectical materialism, the role of the individual in history, and class warfare. Readers interested in a dialogic study would do well to read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon alongside our Wiseblood Classic Essays on Political Economy by Frédéric Bastiat, a work written from the vantage point of a starkly different philosophical tradition.
Essays on Political Economy by Frédéric Bastiat
"Prudent, practical business folk, flocked to the banner of Bastiat, the most superficial and therefore the most successful representative of apologetic vulgar economics. . ."
-Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
Claude Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French politician, classical liberal economist, and philosopher. This collection of his Essays on Political Economy contains some of his most famous, most prescient, and most controversial writings, including "Parable of the Broken Window," which illuminates the economy of destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, as well as "The Law," in which he juxtaposes justice, which has specific limits, with philanthropy, which is limitless, and therefore government can grow endlessly when the latter becomes its function. The resulting statism is "based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator." Even those readers who, like Marx, disagree with him, will not fail to be impressed by his forceful logic, parabolic imagination, and wit.
Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays is divided into two major parts. The second part is an assemblage of the author's journalistic articles crowned by two extras only found in this edition: "Imperialism, or the Mistake About Man," and "The Home of Man." In the first part, G.K. Chesterton takes to task the theories, claims, and pragmatic fallout of unrestrained capitalism. Readers will come to understand the meaning behind Chesterton's classic paradoxical maxim: "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." In the wake of the bank, housing, and student loan crises, our times are ripe for Utopia of Usurers.
As part of our efforts to resuscitate our impoverished culture, Wiseblood Books is assembling a series of philosophical classics, most of which are rooted in the Western tradition. By making affordable versions of these books available to a new generation, we hope to stimulate thinking and dialogue for the clarification of thought. In the tradition of the Great Books program, we include works whose ideas are often contradictory. Our editors do not personally espouse all of the theories and opinions contained in each volume, but we consider them consequential enough that they merit careful study; the effects of powerful ideas cannot be understated.
Sophist by Plato
". . . imitation is a kind of creation—of images, however, as we affirm, and not of real things."
-The Eleatic Stranger, Plato's SOPHIST
Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, and teacher of Aristotle. In SOPHIST he sets the foundations for investigations—the most famous of which were undertaken thousands of years later by Hegel and Heidegger—into the nature of Being and Not-Being. As he undertakes his formal task, which is to define the nature of the Sophist, and to describe the characteristics of sophistry, Plato grapples with our capacity to know, and the human tendency toward deception. As we read in the extensive critical introduction: "Now the painter is a man who professes to make all things, and children, who see his pictures at a distance, sometimes take them for realities: and the Sophist pretends to know all things, and he, too, can deceive young men, who are still at a distance from the truth, not through their eyes, but through their ears, by the mummery of words, and induce them to believe him. But as they grow older, and come into contact with realities, they learn by experience the futility of his pretensions. The Sophist, then, has not real knowledge; he is only an imitator, or image-maker."
Philosophy of Mind by G.W.F. Hegel
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND sets forth G.W.F. HEGEL's (1770-1831) science of the experience and phenomonlogy of consciousness. This condensed version of PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, which the author created for his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, explores Hegel's grasp of: 1) what mind is 2) the sensibility of the physical soul 3) the immediacy of the feeling soul 4) consciousness and the intellect 5) the theoretical mind 6) memory, intuition, and imagination 7) the morality of conscience 8) moral life, or social ethics 9) revealed religion in the absolute mind, and more. This 1894 translation of the German original, by Scottish philosopher and Oxford University professor WILLIAM WALLACE (1843-1897), remains a favorite of Hegel students, and is celebrated for its eloquence.
The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a philosopher, theologian, satirist, and human being. In THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH Kierkegaard unflinchingly explores the problem of despair, thereby forging a sort of Christian psychology/philosophy of the subject.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION:
Oh, but even if Christ had not awakened Lazarus from the dead, is it not true that this sickness, that death itself, was not a sickness unto death? When Christ comes to the grave and cries with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come forth” (11:43), it is evident enough that “this” sickness is not unto death. But even if Christ had not said these words — merely the fact that He, who is “the resurrection and the life” (11:25), comes to the grave, is not this a sufficient sign that this sickness is not unto death, does not the fact that Christ exists mean that this sickness is not unto death?
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
In his essay “Freudianism and Psychoanalysis,” philosopher Jacques Maritain writes that “Freudian metaphysics contain in their very depths what Max Scheler calls resentment: the resentment of a soul wounded and humiliated from childhood, and which, as it seems, strikes at human nature itself; and especially resentment against all rational, moral, religious regulations, which pretend to conquer the world of instinct, and which in reality augment, in Freud's opinion, man's misfortune and lead to psychic disorders.” Although Maritain finds Freudian metaphysics deeply problematic, he carefully separates out Freudian psychoanalysis which, he contends, establishes Freud as a genius of discovery and investigation. Crucial to the psychoanalytic genius, he writes, is the theory that “a psychic state is determined not only by the foreground—that is, by the object which presents itself to the psychic energy; but it is also determined by the background—that is, by other, earlier states or psychic dispositions of the subject itself. The psychic foreground is both the effect and the sign of these unconscious states and dispositions. It is their 'psychic expression.' This is especially true in the case of psychic products which are not centered in reality: dreams, hallucinations, neurotic symptoms.”
In A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) sets forth his major theories on dream signification, censorship, and interpretation, the psychology of errors, fear and anxiety, transference, neuroses, and more.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon by Karl Marx
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a philosopher, economist, and all-around revolutionary. On the surface, this essay explicates the French coup of 1851, in which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte assumed dictatorial powers. We see Marx emerging as political historian, treating real historical events through the lens of his his materialist conception of history.
This volume should be of interest particularly to those for whom the prospect of reading the daunting Das Kapital is, well, daunting, as herein the reader will become acquainted with many of Marx's foundational theories and ideas, including dialectical materialism, the role of the individual in history, and class warfare. Readers interested in a dialogic study would do well to read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon alongside our Wiseblood Classic Essays on Political Economy by Frédéric Bastiat, a work written from the vantage point of a starkly different philosophical tradition.
Essays on Political Economy by Frédéric Bastiat
"Prudent, practical business folk, flocked to the banner of Bastiat, the most superficial and therefore the most successful representative of apologetic vulgar economics. . ."
-Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
Claude Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French politician, classical liberal economist, and philosopher. This collection of his Essays on Political Economy contains some of his most famous, most prescient, and most controversial writings, including "Parable of the Broken Window," which illuminates the economy of destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, as well as "The Law," in which he juxtaposes justice, which has specific limits, with philanthropy, which is limitless, and therefore government can grow endlessly when the latter becomes its function. The resulting statism is "based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator." Even those readers who, like Marx, disagree with him, will not fail to be impressed by his forceful logic, parabolic imagination, and wit.
Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays is divided into two major parts. The second part is an assemblage of the author's journalistic articles crowned by two extras only found in this edition: "Imperialism, or the Mistake About Man," and "The Home of Man." In the first part, G.K. Chesterton takes to task the theories, claims, and pragmatic fallout of unrestrained capitalism. Readers will come to understand the meaning behind Chesterton's classic paradoxical maxim: "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." In the wake of the bank, housing, and student loan crises, our times are ripe for Utopia of Usurers.
