Books by David Bromwich

Liberal education has been attacked by the far-right since it began. Government and journalism have pressed for a curriculum that focuses on Western culture. The left wants to adopt a more multicultural education. This book argues against both, and asks for a return to free thinking.

Compelling essays from one of today's most esteemed cultural criticsSpanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the importance of imagination and sympathy to suggest how these faculties may illuminate the motives of human action and the reality of justice. These wide-ranging essays address thinkers and topics from Gandhi and Martin Luther King on nonviolent resistance, to the dangers of identity politics, to the psychology of the heroes of classic American literature.Bromwich demonstrates that moral imagination allows us to judge the right and wrong of actions apart from any benefit to ourselves, and he argues that this ability is an innate individual strength, rather than a socially conditioned habit. Political topics addressed here include Edmund Burke and Richard Price's efforts to define patriotism in the first year of the French Revolution, Abraham Lincoln's principled work of persuasion against slavery in the 1850s, the erosion of privacy in America under the influence of social media, and the use of euphemism to shade and anesthetize reactions to the global war on terror. Throughout, Bromwich considers the relationship between language and power, and the insights language may offer into the corruptions of power.Moral Imagination captures the singular voice of one of the most forceful thinkers working in America today.

This biography of statesman Edmund Burke (1730-1797), covering three decades, is the first to attend to the complexity of Burke's thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. David Bromwich reads Burke's career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be.

The poems that are written about, in the essays found in this book, all stake a definitive claim for the modernist style and its intent to capture an audience beyond the present moment. Bromwich's essays offer readings of individual poets, as well as comparisons between poets and their style.

The author connects the accidents of the poet Wordsworth's life with the originality of his works, tracking the impulses that turned him to poetry after the death of his parents and during his years as an enthusiastic disciple of the French Revolution. Bromwich argues that his political idealism deeply motivated his writings of the 1790s.

An appreciation of essayist, lecturer and radical pamphleteer, William Hazlitt, and his works. It provides both a re-evaluation of the aesthetics of Romanticism and a sustained intellectual portrait.