Imagining The Real Essays on Politics, Ideology and Literature [Hardcover]

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.Introduction The Politics of Equilibrium Freedom for What? Must New Worlds Also be Good? Honesty, Honour and Trust The Ideology of Deconstruction Fetishizing the Unseen Thinking Degree Zero Fiction, Meaning and Utterance The Case of L. H. Myers Providencem, Authority and the Moral Life in The Tempest Index

'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

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.