A Companion to American Fiction, 1865 - 1914 Quotes

“In this conclusion, Freeman suggests that naturalism is Calvinism revived, and that the appropriate answer to such a cold, hard, and fruitless philosophy is the same as it was to Calvinism proper.”
― Robert Paul Lamb, A Companion To American Fiction 1865 - 1914

“Common Sense’’ philosophy. It stands between the extremes of idealism and realism, between fundamentalist Christianity and atheism, between anarchy and totalitarianism. It addresses political and religious questions, epistemological questions, and aesthetic questions in a complex interplay. But, as a compromise philosophy, it is always pulled at the extremes. Whether to stress objectivity or subjectivity, whether to stress the communal pull of sympathy or the individualistic implications of philosophical voluntarism, whether to see sensibility as related to innate ideas and thus as a kind of idealism, or to see sensibility merely as a capacity that can be developed only in contact with an external world: these questions came up repeatedly in the”
― Robert Paul Lamb, A Companion To American Fiction 1865 - 1914

“including Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and popularizers such as Archibald Alison, elaborating on sensibility and sympathy as the most important aspects of human psychology. These products of what Henry May calls the Didactic Enlightenment were enormously influential in America. They were heavily represented in the curricula of American colleges, and their ideas influenced everything from the Declaration of Independence to the practice and theory of all of the fine arts.”
― Robert Paul Lamb, A Companion To American Fiction 1865 - 1914

“including Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and popularizers such as Archibald Alison, elaborating on sensibility and”
― Robert Paul Lamb, A Companion To American Fiction 1865 - 1914

“Instead of a fogged understanding, Austin suggests, we can attain greater insight into the mystery of our being – can, in fact, through the imaginative stories we tell ourselves, actuate increasingly improved contingent versions of human reality.”
― Robert Paul Lamb, A Companion To American Fiction 1865 - 1914