A Half-Century of Greatness

Contents

Editor’s Introduction

Foreword by Aaron Kramer

PART I: England at the Great Divide: 1830–1848

1. The Battle for Reform

2. The Battle for Minds and Secular Salvation: “Utopia” and “Utility”

1. “Utopia”

2. “Utility” and “Happiness”

3. Thomas Carlyle: Out of the “Nay” into the “Everlasting Yea”

4. Charles Dickens: The Novel in “The Battle of Life”

5. John Stuart Mill: The Majesty of Reason

PART II: Russia: Dark Laughter and Siberia Nikolay Gogol and Young Dostoevsky

1. The Dark Laughter of Nikolay Gogol

2. Young Dostoevsky: The Road to Siberia

PART III: Europe: Revolution 1848–1849

1. The Lightning of Ideas: Reason and Revolution 1835–1848

1. G. W. F. Hegel

2. David Friedrich Strauss

3. Ludwig Feuerbach

5. Friedrich Engels

6. Marx and Engels

2. Revolution: 1848–1849

4. Failure of the Revolutions

3. The Lyre and the Sword: Art and Revolution

1. Hungary—July 31, 1849: Sándor Petöfi—The Poet as Warrior

2. Russia: Tsar and Serf—Taras Shevchenko

3. Siegfried on the Barricades: Richard Wagner in Dresden, May 1849

4. Alexander Herzen and the Russian Self-Exiled

PART IV: Swan Song and Elegy: Germany and the Poets

1. Georg Büchner

2. Georg Herwegh

3. Ferdinand Freiligrath

4. Georg Weerth and Adolf Glassbrenner

5. Heinrich Heine

PART V: England: Crystal Palace and Bleak House

1. The March of Empire and the Victorian Conscience

2. The Novel and the Crisis of Conscience: The Brontës— The Caged Rebels of Haworth

PART VI: Woman of Valor: George Eliot and the Victorians

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

Further Reading for Heroic Imagination and A Half-Century of Greatness