George A. Panichas' essays on Dostoevsky's art and thought have gained wide praise for their critical power and insight. The Burden of Vision, culminating twenty years of studying, teaching, and writing on Dostoevsky, Professor Panichas devotes himself to a careful assessment of the religious themes and meanings of Dostoevsky's major novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, A Raw Youth, and The Brothers Karamazou. Throughout, Professor Panichas sees Dostoevsky's religious imagination in its radical, prophetic, and eschatological dimensions. "Dostoevsky's novels push the reader into the relentless complexity of moral war in which no human emotion is spared and no intricacy is reduced." Focusing on the pervasive spiritual consciousness at work in Dostoevsky's art, Panichas views the Russian author not as a religious doctrinaire, but as a visionary whose "ﬁve great novels constitute a sequential meditation on man's human and superhuman destiny.""Dr. Panichas' book is a major event in a long history of critical literature on Dostoevsky. It follows, in its own way, the tradition of such religiously inspired and profound critics as N. Berdyaev, V. Ivanov and Romano Guardini. It is the best from the pen of an American author, comparable only to G. Steiner's 'Tolstoy or Dost0evsky'.Both Panichas' understanding of Orthodox Christian mysticism and his subtle critical gift have enabled him to reach that point of intellectual empathy with Dostoevsky which has eluded most secular-minded critics."SERGEI LEVITZKYEmeritus, Georgetown UniversityGEORGE A. PANICHAS holds the Ph.D. from Nottingham University, England, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of the United Kingdom. Among his numerous writings is The Reverent Discipline: Essays in Literary Criticism and Culture (1974). Since 1962 he has been professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park, and since 1984, editor of the quarterly Modern Age.

The burden of vision: Dostoevsky's spiritual art

Panichas, George A.

W.B. Eerdmans

Irving Babbitt in Our Time

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Catholic Univ of Amer Pr

This important volume brings to completion the monumental trilogy George A. Panichas began to write more than thirty years ago. The Reverent Discipline, The Courage of Judgment, and this new collection are all outstanding critiques not only of literature and criticism but also of society and culture. Writing from the tradition of what Edmund Burke calls "the dissidence of dissent," Panichas combines moral commitment and polemical fervor to diagnose the crisis of modernity.The overall tone of the essays is urgent, censorious, and combative, as the author assiduously interconnects the needs of religion, the quality of leadership, the thought of great writers, the current plight of the humanities, and the structure of politics. He does not fear controversy when he assigns blame or when he cites lapses that separate society from metaphysical moorings and religious traditions.Throughout, the critic views contemporary life in a state of emergency; the reader in turn views the critic under arms and under fire. Essays like "The Christ of Simone Weil," "The New York Times and Eric Voegelin," "Henry James and Paradigms of Character," "The Incubus of Deconstruction," "Metaphors of Virtue," and "Conservatism, Change, and the Life of the Spirit," to name but a few, indicate the range of a generalist who speaks out on issues of acute significance.The unifying principle informing these essays is the insistence that the critic's mission is to conserve universal values and truths in a world of flux and confusion. Panichas' conservatism is one of conservation, anchored firmly in the belief that there are enduring things to defend and save. This timely collection of writings will challenge all readers concerned with moral disarray and spiritual barrenness in modern times.

The Critic As Conservator: Essays in Literature, Society, and Culture

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Writers of novels, plays, and poems use their imagination with an evident freedom; by contrast, makers of Christian doctrine seem to impose limits, reducing the open-ended meaning of images to exact concepts and summing up the loose ends of stories in one unified Story. But the author of this study sets out to show how images and stories in literature can actually help the theologian to make doctrinal statements, while at the same time careful theological thinking can assist the critical reading of literary texts. Such a dialogue is worked out in studies of the poetry, of William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the novels of D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, and William Going. Here the tension between the freedom of imagination and the limits of doctrine is seen to be only a part of more far-reaching tensions of freedom in human life, which account for a sense of 'fallenness', and which a dialogue between literature and Christian doctrine can do much to illuminate. In all this, the relationship between imagination and revelation is never far from the center of the discussion.

Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity: Criticism as the Pursuit of Virture

Mercer University Press

In Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity, George A. Panichas continues his criticism of life, literature, and thought. As with his three earlier works of criticism over the past twenty-five years—The Reverent Discipline (1974), The Courage of Judgement (1982), and The Critic as Conservator (1992)—Panichas seeks to overcome the crises of modernism in which we agonize, and to attain the promise of spiritual and moral order. 
The overarching critical emphasis is on human possibility, on the spiritual recovery and revitalization of American society and culture, especially the republic of arts and letters. This volume contains Panichas's literary, critical, and cultural affirmations, stressing as it does the flow of aspiration and the power of ascent. At the same time, it does not fail to confront the power of the abyss of negations, so pervasive and dominant in the modern world, and of the profane critical spirit that flourishes in the academy and the intellectual community. 
The title, derived from Plato's Phaedrus, intends to point the reader to the quest for beauty, wisdom, and goodness. The ultimate goal of the book, therefore, is silmultaneously restorative and transcendent, and in active contention with those forces and conditions in modern civilization that, like the pull of gravity, diminish the moral and ethical life.

Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity: Criticism As the Pursuit of Virtue

Mercer Univ Pr

This book seeks to renew interest in Joseph Conrad's moral imagination. Not literary theory but the dignity of creative literature impels the author's reflections on Conrad's novels in their "varied shades of moral significance." Here, the author approaches Conrad's novels in the context of what the novelist V.S. Naipaul writes: "In fiction he did not seek to discover; he sought to explain; the discovery of every tale is a moral one." In illuminating interpretations the author focuses on the consequences of moral darkness and moral warfare as he proceeds to uncover Conrad's basic ideas and meaning. The book shows that morality in Conrad's work is not reducible to an absolute category but must be apprehended in the forms of both moral crises and the possibility of moral recovery enacted in their complexity and tensions. Guiding a reader's travels to the furthest realms of Conrad's imagination so as to penetrate to the heart of the novelist's moral vision is one of the author's dominant aims. These travels take the reader to The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Victory, Under Western Eyes, Chance, and The Rover. At the center of this study is a long chapter on Nostromo (1904), which is set in a Latin American state and presents a fervid political drama of rapacity, intrigue, betrayal, ideology, revolution. The author views this novel as representative of Conrad's supreme vision of the human world and the human soul in disorder. No chapter better describes how society and character are radically transformed by "material interested" that defy first principles. Anyone disturbed by postmodernist advocates of a New World Order has much to ponder in this challenging book.

Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision

Reference

Modern Age: The First Twenty-Five Years: A Selection

A feast of profound, stimulating, and foundational essays—a brilliant contemporary introduction to great minds. —Michael Novak These seventy-eight essays characterize the richness and diversity of conservative scholarship. Modern Age was founded in 1957 by Russell Kirk, with Henry Regnery and David S. Collier. The magazine is now published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. George A. Panichas is the current editor of Modern Age and a Professor of English at the University of Maryland.

MODERN AGE

United States

Liberty Fund, Inc.

The Courage of Judgment

Univ of Tennessee Pr

This book seeks to renew interest in Joseph Conrad's moral imagination. Not literary theory but the dignity of creative literature impels the author's reflections on Conrad's novels in their ?varied shades of moral significance.? In illuminating interpretations the author focuses on the consequences of moral darkness and moral warfare as he proceeds to uncover Conrad's basic ideas and meaning. The book shows that morality in Conrad's work is not reducible to an absolute category but must be apprehended in the forms of both moral crises and the possibility of moral recovery enacted in their complexity and tensions. Guiding a reader's travels to the furthest realms of Conrad's imagination so as to penetrate to the heart of the novelist's moral vision is one of the author's dominant aims. These travels take the reader to The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Victory, Under Western Eyes, Chance, and The Rover. It also contains a new chapter on the Heart of Darkness.

British & Irish

Restoring The Meaning of Conservatism: Writings from Modern Age

Restoring the Meaning of Conservatism collects those writings of eminent literary scholar and critic George A. Panichas which appeared in the quarterly Modern Age between 1965 and 2005. Panichas became the editor of Modern Age, founded by Russell Kirk in 1957, in 1982. Both before and after that date, he has labored in his writing to act as a “conservator” of traditionalist intellectual, religious, literary, educational, and philosophical values. This collection provides a bulwark for standards of discrimination anchored in the virtues of sincerity and dignity, amply conveying the compelling character of Panichas’s moralist criticism and its relevance to the ongoing crisis of the West.

Literary

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Panichas, George A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Panichas, George A.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Panichas, George A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The burden of vision: Dostoevsky's spiritual art

Irving Babbitt in Our Time

The Critic As Conservator: Essays in Literature, Society, and Culture

Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity: Criticism as the Pursuit of Virture

Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity: Criticism As the Pursuit of Virtue

Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision

MODERN AGE

The Courage of Judgment

Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision

Restoring The Meaning of Conservatism: Writings from Modern Age