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Imagining The Real

Essays on Politics, Ideology and Literature

R Grant author David Inshaw illustrator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan

Published:1st Aug '03

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Imagining The Real cover

Robert Grant is the author of "Oakeshott" and "The Politics of Sex and Other Essays".

Throughout its ten related essays, Imagining the Real contrasts our abstract imaginings about the human world with the imaginative insights provided by art and experience. Myers and Beckett as truly critical, because truly imaginative, exponents of ideas.Throughout its ten related essays, Imagining the Real contrasts our abstract imaginings about the human world with the imaginative insights provided by art and experience. It questions, variously, the relevance of game theory and sociobiology to politics; the supposed intrinsic values of liberal freedom, cultural change, and democratic action; and the claims of Marxism, deconstruction and 'Theory' generally to be non-ideological. More positively, it reinterprets fiction as a specific invitation to imagine, and celebrates Shakespeare, L.H. Myers and Beckett as truly critical, because truly imaginative, exponents of ideas.

'The cumulative effect of the new collection [of essays, is]...one of outstanding brilliance, insight, trenchancy and faithful answerability to the argument in hand.' - David Wiggins, New College, Oxford

'Imagining the Real...covers a wide range of topics (from honesty to Derrida, from The Tempest to game theory), but with a consistent purpose: to explore the ways in which culture is the bearer and guarantor of human values, and to expose the errors of those who think otherwise.' - Noel Malcolm, The New Criterion

ISBN: 9780333973714

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 490g

248 pages