Humanism and America: Essays on the outlook of modern civilisation

A little about the book

This collection brings together writers who ask what should guide cultural and moral judgment in a period fascinated by scientific explanation, social change, and new artistic forms. Its contributors examine literature, religion, education, psychology, and the arts, arguing over what a humanist outlook might preserve or challenge. The essays offer positions in an active debate, rather than a single introductory definition that every author simply repeats.

Norman Foerster’s editorial framing places the discussion within the unsettled cultural climate of the early twentieth century. Across the volume, questions of discipline, tradition, common sense, and intellectual authority recur in different settings. Some essays address broad principles, while others turn toward particular kinds of writing or the problems of criticism and teaching. Readers can follow the agreements between contributors, but the differences in emphasis are equally useful. The book is especially revealing as a record of how a group of critics understood the stakes of modern culture, and of what they believed education and serious reading ought to accomplish.

Things You May Not Know About Humanism and America

• Foerster is the editor. Norman Foerster organizes the collection and supplies its preface; the individual essays belong to a wider group of contributors with distinct arguments.
• Fourteen contributing essays. The contents list fourteen essays after the preface, followed by a list of books that extends the discussion beyond the volume itself.
• T. S. Eliot contributes. Religion Without Humanism is Eliot’s contribution, placing his argument alongside essays by Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and other critics.
• Arts and education share the volume. The subjects range from science and psychology to tragedy, fiction, criticism, and education, giving the cultural debate a deliberately broad scope.
• Published in 1930. Farrar and Rinehart published the collection in 1930, and its preface responds to the intellectual atmosphere following the First World War.