Reviews for The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment

The average rating for The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-09-27 00:00:00 Jeremy Morley An examination of various different kinds of cultivated "detachment" that were theorized in the 19th-century. The overall claim is that the Victorian period has a variety of overlapping yet conflicted attitudes--frequently ambivalent--toward the ideal of detachment. Anderson is interested in the way modern-day academic critiques of "detachment" as a form of covert power "flatten out" the rich diversity of theories of detachment that were formulated in the 19th century--by figures like Mill, Bronte, Dickens, Wilde, and Eliot.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-23 00:00:00 John Bendon It is difficult to know how to rate this book. On the one hand, it comprises a staggering amount of work on the part of Shippey and Haarder, not just in collecting the articles of previous critics, but in translating, editing, and arranging them. On the other, much of the criticism itself is of the very worst kind, where the data is not so much analyzed as manipulated, distorted, or simply made up. Perhaps it is only because I began my academic career as a scientist, but I find it offensive when critics cut out the bits of a poem they don't like simply because the decide it cannot be genuine. Without corroborating evidence, how can we know? Now Tolkien's frustration is more readily understandable. That said, knowing what has come before is always valuable, if only so that one can not repeat the errors of the past.