Philip Nicholas Furbank

A Life (A Harvest Book)

E. M. Forster

A portrait of one of the key figures of the French Enlightenment examines Diderot's private life, public career, and literary and philosophical works

A Critical Biography

Diderot

A. M. Cain

A Translation of the Fashion Magazine La Derniere Mode, with Commentary

Mallarme on Fashion

W.R. Owens

Daniel Defoe was one of the most important and best-known writers of the eighteenth century but there is a feeling among scholars that the Defoe 'canon' is a remarkably strange and not very satisfactory construction. Between 1790, when the first bibliography of Defoe appeared, and 1971, when J.R. Moore published the second edition of his Checklist, the canon had swollen from just over a hundred items to 570. A large proportion of these attributions had been made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the basis of features of style, 'favourite phrases' and resemblance to Defoe's known views. This book is a list of all the items in Moore's Checklist (the current authority on the Defoe canon) that at present the authors consider questionable with in each case a note as to who was the first attributer, a brief synopsis and an explanation of the reasons for doubting the ascription.

Critique of J.R.Moore's Checklist

Defoe De-Attributions

This is the authorized biography of E.M. Forster.

E. M. Forster: The growth of the novelist (1879-1914)

Italo Svevo the man and the Writer

Quel piacere malizioso. Ovvero la retorica delle classi sociali

E. M. Forster: Polycrates' ring (1914-1970)

W. R. Owens

A KWIC Concordance to Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders

In Behalf P. N. Furbank argues that in thinking about society and politics, one needs to start from the proposition that every human being contains within himself or herself the entire potentiality of the human species and that it is therefore wrong to regard cultural differences as innate. ø This conclusion, in turn, raises doubts about the concept of pluralism as propounded by political philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin. According to Berlin, societies incarnate sets of values that, while good in themselves, might be incommensurable or incompatible with those of other societies. As Furbank shows, however, the epithets ?incommensurable? and ?incompatible? fall to pieces under scrutiny. Furthermore, the tacit implication that pluralism is a political concept, rivaling democracy, appears to be an illusion. ø Furbank proceeds to consider the question of what it means to act ?on behalf? of others. He notes that the apparent strength of ?politics of the person??the ground of feminist, black, and gay politics, with its insistence that everyone should speak with his or her own distinctive voice, unmediated by representation or action on behalf of others?is its freedom from the taint of philanthropy. But he argues that this freedom comes at a high price, which is no less than that of involving the term ?politics? in self-contradiction. He concludes that there is seemingly no substitute for what one might call ?politics proper? and that this form of politics is by nature on behalf of someone or something not itself?a politics that is, incurably, philanthropic, and, being so, is exposed to all the snares and temptations with which philanthropy is plagued.

Behalf

This authorized biography traces the growth of the novelist--his education and travels, his literary success, his sexual and social emancipation as an admitted homosexual, and his emergence as an active public figure

A Life

I. J. Spackman

A KWIC Concordance to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

Philip Nicholas Furbank

About

Books

Join the club