Culture and Anarchy is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold was an English poet, and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been characterized as a sage writer, a type, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book in 1869. The preface was added in 1875.[1]
Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture Culture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses: established his High Victorian cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s.
According to his view advanced in the book, "Culture [...] is a study of perfection". He further wrote that: "[Culture] seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light [...]".
His often quoted phrase "[culture is] the best which has been thought and said" comes from the Preface to Culture and Anarchy:
- The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.
Notes
- ^ Robert H. Super, Culture and Anarchy with Friendship's Garland and Some Literary Essays, Volume V of The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, The University of Michigan Press, 1965.
References
- Robert H. Super (editor), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold in eleven volumes (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960-1977)
- Volume V: Culture and Anarchy with Friendship's Garland and Some Literary Essays (1965).
- Stefan Collini (editor), Culture and Anarchy and other writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) part of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series.
- Collini's introduction to this edition attempts to show that "Culture and Anarchy ... has left a lasting impress upon subsequent debate about the relation between politics and culture" —Introduction, pg ix.
- Lionel Trilling Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher, who was a member of The New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review; although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the great U.S. critics of the twentieth century in tracing the contemporary cultural, social, and political, Matthew Arnold (New York: Norton, 1939)
- Park Honan, Matthew Arnold, a life (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1981) ISBN 0070296979
- Stefan Collini, Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
- Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (Routledge: London and New York, 1995) ISBN 0-415-05374-9
- Young demonstrates the extent to which Arnold's ideas about culture in Culture and Anarchy are adapted from contemporary ethnography (i.e. racial theory).
External links
- Culture and Anarchy at Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg, abbreviated as PG, is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, in order to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make
Categories: 1869 books | Cultural studies books |
