Imagining The Real

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. The Politics of Equilibrium

   • Robert Grant

   Pages 1-24

3. Freedom for What?

   • Robert Grant

   Pages 25-36

4. Must New Worlds Also Be Good?

   • Robert Grant

   Pages 37-53

5. Honesty, Honour and Trust

   • Robert Grant

   Pages 54-65

6. The Ideology of Deconstruction

   • Robert Grant

   Pages 66-87

7. Fetishizing the Unseen

   • Robert Grant

   Pages 88-102

8. Thinking Degree Zero

   • Robert Grant

   Pages 103-122

9. Fiction, Meaning and Utterance

   • Robert Grant

   Pages 123-136

10. The Case of L.H. Myers

    • Robert Grant

    Pages 137-161

11. Providence, Authority and the Moral Life in The Tempest

    • Robert Grant

    Pages 162-187

12. Back Matter

    Pages 188-248

    PDF

Throughout its ten related essays, Imagining the Real contrasts our abstract imaginings about the human world with the imaginative insights provided by art and experience. It questions, variously, the relevance of game theory and sociobiology to politics; the supposed intrinsic values of liberal freedom, cultural change, and democratic action; and the claims of Marxism, deconstruction and 'Theory' generally to be non-ideological. More positively, it reinterprets fiction as a specific invitation to imagine, and celebrates Shakespeare, L.H. Myers and Beckett as truly critical, because truly imaginative, exponents of ideas.

• art
• Beckett
• construction
• English literature
• essay
• experience
• fiction
• ideology
• interpret
• liberty
• Marx
• Marxism
• morality
• trust
• William Shakespeare

'The cumulative effect of the new collection [of essays, is]...one of outstanding brilliance, insight, trenchancy and faithful answerability to the argument in hand.' - David Wiggins, New College, Oxford

'Imagining the Real...covers a wide range of topics (from honesty to Derrida, from The Tempest to game theory), but with a consistent purpose: to explore the ways in which culture is the bearer and guarantor of human values, and to expose the errors of those who think otherwise.' - Noel Malcolm, The New Criterion

• University of Glasgow, UK

  Robert Grant

ROBERT GRANT is Reader in English Literature at Glasgow University. A frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, he is the author of two previous books, Oakeshott and The Politics of Sex and Other Essays, and of over 100 essays, articles and reviews. He has lectured widely in the USA, Eastern Europe and Japan, and is currently writing Michael Oakeshott's 'official' biography.

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