Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, The

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Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of Henry Adams

This Library of America volume includes the best-known works of Henry Adams, one of the most powerful and original minds to illuminate the American scene from the Civil War to World War I. Now brought together for the first time in a single volume, these works show the many formsâ€”fiction, poetry, philosophical and historical speculation, autobiographyâ€”in which Adams gave expression to his vision of the meaning of the unsettling changes in American life and values.

Each of the two novels,Â DemocracyÂ andÂ Esther, chooses a woman on whom to center the effects of social change. InÂ Democracy, Madeleine Lee, an emancipated and idealistic young widow, moves to Washington to learn the nature of political power and is disillusioned upon discovering the intrigues of rampant corruption. The free-thinking heroine inÂ Esther, caught in the warfare between science and religion, finds that she cannot surrender her moral independence, even to marry a clergyman.
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Adams, though a man of the modern world, remained in temperament a child of the eighteenth century, his political ideals shaped by his presidential ancestors, great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams. The failure of those ideals to withstand the challenges of an industrialized America drove him to seek refuge in the study of the medieval age of faith in France. Out of it came his skepticâ€™s â€œPrayer to the Virgin of Chartres.â€ Her presence dominates the book that followedâ€”Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. In evocative and sensitive prose Adams moves from the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass of Chartres to the religion, literature, politics, social order, and crusades of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Adams translates the poetry of courtly love and recounts the drama of Eleanor of Aquitaineâ€™s life and the timeless love of Abelard and Heloise. The narrative rises at the end to the brilliantly re-enacted drama of St. Thomas Aquinasâ€™ victory over the rival philosophers.
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IfÂ Mont Saint MichelÂ portrayed a world unified by a common faith,Â The Education of Henry AdamsÂ portrayed a world irresistibly moving toward chaos. The world once unified by the Virgin was now ruled by the impersonal Dynamo and was already confronted by the â€œmetaphysical bombâ€ of radium and the prospect of infinite energy for manâ€™s use. Adams balances, with extraordinary urbanity and wit, the rival claims he found as much in himself as in modern civilization. Together, these two works still pose an urgent question: can the human mind ultimately control the monstrous aggregates of power which it has wrung from nature?

LIBRARY OF AMERICAÂ is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nationâ€™s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, Americaâ€™s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Country USA
Manufacturer Library of America
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 9780940450127
ReleaseDate 1983-11-15
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780940450127

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Library of America
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	9780940450127
ReleaseDate	1983-11-15
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780940450127

Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of Henry Adams

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