Overview

The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature provides readers with a comprehensive reassessment of the value of humanism in an intellectual landscape. Offering contributions by leading international scholars, this volume seeks to define literature as a core expressive form and an essential constitutive element of newly reformulated understandings of humanism. While the value of humanism has recently been dominated by anti-humanist and post-humanist perspectives which focused on the flaws and exclusions of previous definitions of humanism, this volume examines the human problems, dilemmas, fears, and aspirations expressed in literature, as a fundamentally humanist art form and activity. Divided into three overarching categories, this companion will explore the histories, developments, debates, and contestations of humanism in literature, and deliver fresh definitions of ""the new humanism"" for the humanities. This focus aims to transcend the boundaries of a world in which human life is all too often defined in terms of restrictions—political, economic, theological, intellectual—and lived in terms of obedience, conformity, isolation, and fear. The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature will provide invaluable support to humanities students and scholars alike seeking to navigate the relevance and resilience of humanism across world cultures and literatures.

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Michael Bryson is Professor of English at California State University, Northridge. Among his books are two on the English poet John Milton, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (2004), and The Atheist Milton (2016), as well as two books on world literature from the ancient to the modern, Love and its Critics (2017), and The Humanist (Re)Turn: Reclaiming the Self in Literature (2019). He is the editor of the Literature in the Humanities section of the open access journal Humanities, and has published widely on American, English, and World literatures.

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