It's Not Me, It's You!


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I loved Jon's book. It's even better than the real thing because you can't hear his voice.' Michael McIntyre










Two Discourses


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Jonathan Richardson


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Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745), one of his generation's foremost portrait painters, was also one of the most influential art theorists in eighteenth-century Britain. His writings constitute the most important art theory discussions in English before the Romantic period. In this critical biography of Richardson, Carol Gibson-Wood provides for the first time a detailed account of the artist's life, including new information from original archival sources and unpublished correspondence, along with an analysis of Richardson's most significant theoretical texts. Gibson-Wood describes art consumption in England in Richardson's time as well as the debates concerning native versus continental painting. She argues that Richardson's personal and written responses to these circumstances quintessentially embodied bourgeois English Enlightenment ideals and the Lockean principles underpinning them. The first part of the book examines Richardson's personal life, professional career, literary aspirations, activities as a collector, and his relations with such contemporaries as Alexander Pope. In the second part Gibson-Wood sets Richardson's writings in the contexts of earlier art theory and of




Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson


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How do minds cause events in the world? How does wanting to write a letter cause a person's hands to move across the page, or believing something to be true cause a person to make a promise? In Actions and Objects, Jonathan Kramnick examines the literature and philosophy of action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when philosophers and novelists, poets and scientists were all concerned with the place of the mind in the world. These writers asked whether belief, desire, and emotion were part of nature—and thus subject to laws of cause and effect—or in a special place outside the natural order. Kramnick puts particular emphasis on those who tried to make actions compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between mind and matter. He follows a long tradition of examining the close relation between literary and philosophical writing during the period, but fundamentally revises the terrain. Rather than emphasizing psychological depth and interiority or asking how literary works were understood as true or fictional, he situates literature alongside philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work.




A Natural History of Pragmatism


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Joan Richardson provides a fascinating and compelling account of the emergence of the quintessential American philosophy: pragmatism. She demonstrates pragmatism's engagement with various branches of the natural sciences and traces the development of Jamesian pragmatism from the late nineteenth century through modernism, following its pointings into the present. Richardson combines strands from America's religious experience with scientific information to offer interpretations that break new ground in literary and cultural history. This book exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary approaches to producing literary criticism. In a series of highly original readings of Edwards, Emerson, William and Henry James, Stevens, and Stein, A Natural History of Pragmatism tracks the interplay of religious motive, scientific speculation, and literature in shaping an American aesthetic. Wide-ranging and bold, this groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of American literature.




The Connoisseur


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Families of Early Hartford, Connecticut


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This book contains the genealogical records of over 950 families of early Hartford, Connecticut. The records that were used were mainly church records, sexton's records, and probate records and are arranged alphabetically by family name.--From Preface.