Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Homer: Passion in the Iliad

   • Simon Haines

   Pages 1-16

3. Sophocles’ Antigone and Thucydides’ Athens: Romanticism and Realism in Politics

   • Simon Haines

   Pages 17-32

4. Plato and Aristotle: Concept and Passion

   • Simon Haines

   Pages 33-52

5. The Inheritance of Augustine: Confessions

   • Simon Haines

   Pages 53-70

6. Aquinas and the Realist Revival

   • Simon Haines

   Pages 71-89

7. Dante and Medieval Romanticism

   • Simon Haines

   Pages 90-108

8. Renaissance, Reformation and Shakespeare’s Realism

   • Simon Haines

   Pages 109-130

9. Romanticism from Descartes to Rousseau

   • Simon Haines

   Pages 131-174

10. Back Matter

    Pages 175-214

    PDF

This accessible and jargon-free book features readings of over 20 key texts and authors in Western poetry and philosophy, including Homer, Plato, Beowulf , Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Rousseau. Simon Haines presents a thought-provoking and theoretically aware account of Western literature and philosophy, arguing that the history of both can be seen as a struggle between two different conceptions of the self: the 'romantic' (or dualist) vs the 'realist' or ('extended').

• Aristotle
• philosophy
• Plato
• poetry
• realism
• reformation
• Renaissance
• Romanticism
• Rousseau

'...this is a hugely impressive book - vast in scope and conception, powerful in execution and...meticulous in detail and reference.' - Stephen Prickett, Regius Professor Emeritus of English, Glasgow University

• Australian National University, Australia

  Simon Haines

SIMON HAINES is a member of the English Department in the School of Humanities at the Australian National University, Australia. He has also been a banker, a diplomat and an intelligence analyst. He is the author of Shelley's Poetry: The Divided Self (Macmillan, 1997) and a number of articles on poetry (especially Romantic and post-Romantic), and the connections between poetry and philosophy (especially moral and political philosophy).

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