Journey Through Despair 18801914 John Ashby Lester by John Ashby Lester 9781400877966, 1400877962 instant download after payment.

English literary culture from the death of Thomas Carlyle to the First World War was paradoxical and diverse. In literature it was a time of confusion and a nervous, often frenzied, search for new terms on which the imagination could live. Professor Lester shows that the literary culture of the period moved steadily from a suspicion that the old bases of significant imaginative life were indefensible to a widespread conviction that they had collapsed. His book is not an exercise in literary criticism. Rather, it is an attempt to discover the "geist" of an age, to provide a synthesis for the years 1880-1914. His overriding concern is: “What is the primary force which so unsettles, disperses, and disorients the imaginative experience of this period?”

Originally published in 1968.

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