The following bibliography includes works that were referred to in my argument, either expressly or implicitly, together with other works which contribute to the understanding of modern culture.
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, London 1983, revised edn. 1991, an examination of the process whereby tribes turn themselves into nations in the post-colonial world.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, for the connection between moral virtue and the education of the emotions.
Aristotle, Poetics, for the theory of tragedy as ‘catharsis’.
Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy, being the classic presentation in English of the case for high culture in a world without faith.
Austen, Jane, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, for the sly demolition of romanticism as a purveyor and traducer of religious thrills.
Barthes, Roland, Le degré zéro de l’écriture, Paris 1964, (tr. Writing Degree Zero,) pretentious statement of ‘structuralist’ principles in criticism.
Baudelaire, Charles, Les fleurs du mal, his artistic triumph, and the first clear voice of the modernist poet.
Baudelaire, Charles, Le peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire’s defence of Manet and the unofficial art of his contemporaries; contained in most collections of Baudelaire’s critical writings.
Baudrillard, Jean, La société de consommation, Paris 1970, Foucauldian attack on consumerism by a master ironist who in more recent work has succumbed to it.
Baumgarten, A.G., Aesthetica, 2 vols. (Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, 1750–58); the first modern use of the term ‘aesthetic’: a curious work, not without interest, concerned largely with the problem of poetic meaning.
Benedict, Ruth, Patterns of Culture, London 1935, leading work of a Spengler-influenced anthropologist who views common culture as the form or pattern through which a community achieves coherence; contains important discussions of the interaction between religion, ceremony and membership.
Besançon, Alain, La Falsification du bien, Paris 1988, tr. Matthew Screech, The Falsification of the Good, London 1996, a study of Soloviev and Orwell, and of the spiritual meaning of the totalitarian thought-process.
Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon, New York 1994, a prodigiously learned attempt to summarise the high culture of Western civilisation, and to say why it matters.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, tr. Richard Nice, London 1984, which contains an attempt (in an appendix) by an old soixante-huitard to relegate Kant’s Critique of Judgement to the category of ‘bourgeois ideology’.
Brann, Eva, ‘Jane Austen’, a lecture delivered at the State University of Minnesota, Annapolis in 1975.1 don’t know where I dug this up or how I would rediscover it; but a moving work by a civilised critic.
Broch, Hermann, Dichtung und Erkennen, Frankfurt, 1976, collected criticism by a meditative novelist who never could see the bright side of anything.
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the French Revolution, prescient analysis of the French Revolution, a moving critique of the Social Contract theory, and an oblique affirmation of common culture as the heart of social and political order.
Chailly, Jacques, The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera, London 1972, an interesting attempt to unpack the symbolism of Mozart’s masterpiece.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria, Everyman Edition, ed. George Watson, London 1956, literary criticism which is also a philosophy of life, and which grows out of and in opposition to the Romanticism of its author.
Collingwood, R.G., Principles of Art, Oxford 1938, an attempt to see the enterprise of modernism in terms of Croce’s aesthetics.
Connor, Steven, Theory and Cultural Value, London 1990, a pertinent instance of ‘theory’, written by a literary scholar in the midst of it, and the mist of it.
Conrad, Joseph, Under Western Eyes, and The Secret Agent, two novels which capture the negativity of revolutionary sentiment.
Croce, Benedetto, Aesthetic, as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, tr. Douglas Ainslee, New York 1922, for the classic attempt to distinguish expression from representation, and to identify the first as the aim of art, the second as its potential enemy.
Derrida, Jacques, Positions, tr. and ed. Alan Bass, London 1987; Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass, Brighton 1982, and … no, that will do.
Dilthey, Wilhelm, Selected Writings, tr. and ed. H.P. Rickman, Cambridge 1976, from which you will discover that Dilthey is very much weaker than his one big idea.
Durkheim, Emile, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris 1912 (Elementary Forms of the Religious Life), the best effort that I know to give an anthropology of religion, and to show why religion is inescapable. I have drawn on this great work in Chapter 2.
Duteurtre, Benoît, Requiem pour une avant-garde, Paris 1995, devastating survey by a musician-novelist of the modernist musical establishment in France, and its stifling effect on the national culture.
Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford 1990, neo-Marxist debunking of the aesthetic. The last gasp of the sixties.
Eliot, T.S., The Waste Land, his modernist poem, the footnotes of which are a useful guide to the anthropological literature which casts light on our predicament.
Eliot, T.S., Four Quartets, Eliot’s homecoming from his prodigal wanderings, in which he plays the parts of father, son and fatted calf.
Eliot, T.S., Selected Essays, London 1932, the works of criticism which did most to re-shape the canon of English literature in accordance with the modernist’s strict dietary requirements.
Eliot, T.S., After Strange Gods, London 1934, three lectures published in the thirties and since then allowed to go out of print, possibly because of subsequent allegations of anti-Semitism.
Eliot, T.S., On the Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, London 1933, 2nd edition 1964, in which Eliot confronts the problem of poetry and belief, discussed in Chapter 4 of this book.
Eliot, T.S., Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, London 1950, a strange book, in which Eliot nevertheless identifies, perhaps for the first time, the religious nature of culture in all its forms.
Ellis, John, Against Deconstruction, Princeton 1989, a workmanlike demolition of deconstruction in its academic heyday, as liable to make converts in the academic world as Billie Graham in rural Afghanistan.
Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, tr. George Eliot, New York 1957, the book which tried to spell out what follows, if the gods are our creations.
Fichte, J.G., Addresses to the German Nation, 1807–8. It needed saying at the time.
Foucault, Michel, Birth of the Clinic, Les Mots et les choses, Surveiller et punir, History of Sexuality, Power/Knowledge, works devoted to rewriting modern history, including the history of ideas, institutions and sexual mores, as the history of ‘bourgeois’ power.
Freud, Sigmund, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in Collected Papers, tr. Joan Rivière, London 1925, vol. 4, in which the founder of psychoanalysis says wise things about the process – the ‘work of mourning’ – through which we all must go, if we are to accept the death of things we love.
Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo, 1913, in which Freud says far less wise things about the structure of primitive societies, and sees the totem as a symbol of the primeval father, murdered so that his sons could enjoy his wives, and re-murdered ceremonially as an expiation of guilt.
Frith, Simon, Performing Rites, Oxford 1996, one of several studies of pop in which Simon Frith bravely tries to discern something in it.
Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Hoare and Smith, New York 1971, sacred text of 1968, written by one of the few Communist Party leaders who never had a chance to kill anyone. Gramsci’s theory of culture as part of the ‘hegemony’ of a ruling class is of abiding relevance.
Greenberg, Clement, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, in Partisan Review, 1939. The essay which set the agenda for the modernist establishment.
Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. Miller and J.N. Findlay, Oxford 1977, containing his account of culture as Bildung, one ‘moment’ in which is the contest between master and slave.
Herder, J.G., Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, tr. T.O. Churchill, 2nd Edn., 2 vols., London 1803, containing Herder’s diffuse account of culture, as the binding force of a people and its history.
Hirsch, E.D., Jr., Cultural Literacy, New York 1988, in which a staunch defender of the old curriculum tries, but without much success, to say why it matters.
Hornby, Nick, Fever Pitch, London 1992, romantic and charming invocation of the world of a football fan, with astute anthropological observations along the way.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, ed. Marianne Cowan: Humanist without Portfolio: an anthology, Detroit, Mich., 1963, a selection from this advocate of a liberal-humanist culture.
Jung, Carl G., The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, tr. R.F.C. Hull, London 1959, for a wishful account of myth which brings the aesthetic and the religious together.
Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, the third of Kant’s great critiques, available in several hopeless translations, and not much clearer in the original, which nevertheless puts aesthetic judgement for the first time at the centre of our modern intellectual concerns.
Kant, Immanuel, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’, in Political Writings, tr. H.B. Nisbet, ed., Hans Reiss, 2nd edn., Cambridge, 1991, in which the philosopher gives his celebrated but empty definition of the movement which would have been the salvation of mankind if only Kant had been in charge of it.
Kant, Immanuel, Perpetual Peace, available in various translations. The idyll of international peace founded on moral law and republican constitution. The political credo of the Enlightenment.
Kierkegaard, Søren, Either/Or, tr. Swenson and Swenson, New York 1959, an inspired vision of what happens to the ethical life, when it falls under the aesthetic gaze.
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. Swenson and Lowrie, London 1941, in which the ‘leap of faith’ becomes a leap into subjectivity and self-hood.
Leavis, F.R., The Great Tradition, New Bearings in English Poetry, The Common Pursuit, Nor Shall my Sword, and a few more, which between them constitute the greatest attempt in our century to rescue culture from the world of mass sentiment, and to acknowledge its moral and spiritual importance. I also refer to the contributions that Leavis made to the journal that he edited, Scrutiny, two volumes of selections from which, edited by Leavis, were published by Cambridge University Press in 1966.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Totemism, tr. Rodney Needham, London 1964, an attempt to dismiss the problem of totemism, by showing that there is no such thing – or at any rate no single thing. Totally unpersuasive, but a useful survey of the controversy.
Leys, Simon, tr. and ed., The Analects of Confucius, London 1996, which tells us how to rediscover piety without religious belief.
Lipsitz, George, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place, London 1994, preposterous post-modern pastiche of professorial pedantry.
Lodge, David, Small World, London 1984, a fictional account of the world of academic English in the late twentieth century; a useful guide to the politics of literary theory.
Maine, Sir Henry, Ancient Law, Oxford 1861, which contains much more than the distinction between status and contract.
Mann, Thomas, Doktor Faustus, the last gasp of the German idea, unless you count Felix Krull (unfinished) and Strauss’s Four Last Songs.
Marcus, Grail, Dead Elvis, New York 1991, on a particular instance of modern totemism.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The German ideology, exuberant first shot at the theory of ideology, in which culture is caricatured as a functional by-product of capitalist ‘relations of production’, part of the ideological disguise of bourgeois power.
Marx, Karl, the 1844 manuscripts, extracted in most editions of Marx’s Selected Works: the classical source for the ‘alienation’ idea, and the borrowings from Hegel, Schiller and Feuerbach. The greatest single influence on the culture of modern universities, and none the better for that.
Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1, for the theory of commodity fetishism.
Milosz, Czeslaw, The Captive Mind, tr. Jane Zielonko, London 1953, the best antidote to Marx and Marxism and a disturbing account of mental and moral corruption.
Nietzsche, F.W., The Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, The Case of Wagner, The Birth of Tragedy, and Wagner in Bayreuth – all seminal texts about modern culture, from a writer who both hated it and loved it.
Norris, Christopher, Derrida, Fontana Modern Masters, London 1987, an amusing illustration of Derrida’s spell-binding quality.
Peacock, Thomas Love, Headlong Hall, for a debunking of romantic sensibility and the culture of feeling.
Pound, Ezra, The ABC of Reading, if only to see why reading matters.
Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony, tr. Angus Davidson, London 1933; the original Italian title tells us more about the real contents of this book: La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella literatura romantica, Milan 1930. A dated but distinguished account of the romantic conjunction of love, death and transgression.
Rosenberg, Harold, The Tradition of the New, New York, 1972. One honest critic’s attempt to stay on the side of modern art through thin and thinner.
Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de linguistique générale, Paris 1966, a dated and obscurantist work which nevertheless achieved an influence out of all proportion to its merits, on account of the obscurantists who borrowed from it.
Schiller, Friedrich, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, tr. E. Wilkerson and L.A. Willoughby, Oxford 1967, which was perhaps the first attempt to describe high culture as an aesthetic phenomenon, and to deduce its social and political importance from that.
Schiller, Friedrich, Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (Naive and Sentimental Poetry), Grossherzog Wilhelm Ernst Ausgabe, Leipzig 1906, vol. 4, pp 532–623, not the best edition, but the only one to hand.
Schleiermacher, F.D.E., Hermeneutics: the handwritten manuscripts, tr. James Duke and Jack Forstman, Missoula 1977, from which you will learn much less than you hoped, but something nonetheless.
Scruton, Roger, Sexual Desire, London and New York 1986: an attempt to vindicate the old view of sexual conduct, and the old view of marriage.
Scruton, Roger, The Philosopher on Dover Beach, London 1990, South Bend, Ind., 1998: a collection of essays, some of which explore further the arguments hinted at in this book – in particular the essays on Spengler and Gierke, and the essay entitled ‘Man’s Second Disobedience’.
Snow, C.P., The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge 1960, in which modern science is represented as a ‘culture’, to the great displeasure of Dr Leavis.
Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, the aura of which is more effectively conveyed by its German title, Das Untergang des Abendlandes – the sinking of the lands of evening, 1921.
Steiner, George, Real Presences, London 1992, an attempt to revive, through high culture, a memory of the old religious epiphany.
Stone, Laurence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, London 1977, for the history of marriage and the impact of Enlightenment ideas upon sexual conduct.
Tanner, Michael, Wagner, London 1996, a succinct and admiring exposition of Wagner and a debunking of the debunkers.
Till, Nicholas, Mozart and the Enlightenment, London 1992, a meticulous and suggestive account of the spiritual meaning of the Enlightenment.
Tönnies, Ferdinand, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887, translated as Community and Society, an important book which nevertheless makes you wonder whether a whole book was needed to make the point.
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, the novel which foresaw and foresuffered all, and which proves that the literary demolition of an illusion is after all entirely futile.
Vaihinger, Hans, The Philosophy of ‘As If’, tr. C.K. Ogden, London 1932, a book which runs many things together and which is in consequence somewhat less interesting than its title.
Van Gennep, Arnold, Les rites de passage, Paris 1909, first anthropological account of the process whereby early societies accomplish the transition from youth to adulthood, and from life to death.
Van Gennep, Arnold, Religions, moeurs et légendes, Paris 1912, for the essay on totemism.
Vico, Giambattista, The New Science, tr. T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch, Ithaca 1970, abridged (thank Heavens) but not so much as to remove all the opinionated crankiness.
Weber, Max, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen, 1922 – selections from which have been included in all student editions of Weber. A massive attempt to describe the process of transition from traditional to modern society, in terms of the transformation of economic, social and religious ties.
Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780-1950, London 1958, in which the culture of the ‘people’ is iconised, and that of the nobs tucked away out of sight. This, the founding document of ‘Cultural Studies’, already foretells the weaknesses that come, when a subject is built around a political agenda rather than critical analysis.
Wintle, Justin, ed., Makers of Modern Culture, London, 1981, a collection of biographical articles identifying leading figures in twentieth-century culture (where ‘culture’ includes the arts, the sciences and pop). A useful, if dated, collection, from which Wintle extracted a shorter Dictionary of Modern Culture. Wintle went on to compose a companion volume: Makers of Nineteenth-Century Culture, London 1982. The implied distinction, between modern and nineteenth-century culture, is not one that I endorse: as readers of this book will be aware, I trace modern culture to the Enlightenment, and modernism to the nineteenth century reaction against Romanticism (itself a product of Enlighten- ment).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. C. Barrett, Oxford 1966, in which the greatest of modern philosophers offers valuable but unsystematic insights.