George A. Panichas & Claes G. Ryn, eds: Irving Babbitt in Our Time

CUA Press, 1986

Front Flap:

Well before his death in 1933, Irving Babbitt had been internationally recognized as an American literary scholar and cultural thinker of unusual intellect, learning, and insight. Literature and life, he insisted, are indivisible. The study of literature must, in effect, become a discipline of ideas and imagination: a discipline that must distinguish between the significant and the insignificant, between literature with an ethical or moral center and literature subservient to the flux of relativism.

Babbitt’s admirers include Paul Elmer More, T. S. Eliot, Louis Mercier, Gordon Keith Chalmers, Walter Lippmann, and, in a later generation, Nathan Pusey, Walter Jackson Bate, and Peter Viereck. Among his critics are Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Ernest Hemingway, and Allen Tate. Although not always mentioned by name, Babbitt has remained a presence in American intellectual consciousness and literary criticism. Even his critics have been indelibly affected by his ideas.

Irving Babbitt in Our Time draws together the essays of ten recognized scholars for a reconsideration and critical reassessment of his work and to demonstrate Babbitt’s relevance to contemporary criticism.

Contents:

George A. Panichas & Claes G. Ryn: Introduction

Russell Kirk: The Enduring Influence of Irving Babbitt

George A. Panichas: Babbitt and Religion

Claes G. Ryn: Babbitt and the Problem of Reality

Folke Leander: Irving Babbitt and Benedetto Croce

Joseph Baldacchino: Babbitt and the Question of Ideology

Peter J. Stanlis: Babbitt, Burke and Rousseau: The Moral Nature of Man

T. John Jamieson: Babbitt and Maurras as Competing Influences on T. S. Eliot

Richard B. Hovey, Jr.: Babbitt and Contemporary Conservative Thought in America

Mary E. Slayton: Irving Babbitt: A Chronology of His Life and Major Works, 1865-1933