Overview
- Includes some of the leading intellectual and cultural historians internationally, including Janet Browne, Lennard Davis, and David Bates
- Lays out a template for studying genius, an enormously influential idea that has somehow eluded much historical study
- Examines genius in a marvelous array of historical contexts, from Bolshevik Russia to Victorian England to the transatlantic slave trade
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History (CIH)
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About this book
The essays in this volume seek to examine the uses to which concepts of genius have been put in different cultures and times. Collectively, they are designed to make two new statements. First, seen in historical and comparative perspective, genius is not a natural fact and universal human constant that has been only recently identified by modern science, but instead a categorical mode of assessing human ability and merit. Second, as a concept with specific definitions and resonances, genius has performed specific cultural work within each of the societies in which it had a historical presence.
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Keywords
Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
About the authors
Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, USA. She is the author of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius and co-author of The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus.
Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College, USA. He is the author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius; Happiness: A History, and the co-editor of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History.
Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College, USA. He is the author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius; Happiness: A History, and the co-editor of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Genealogies of Genius
Editors: Joyce E. Chaplin, Darrin M. McMahon
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497673
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-49765-9Published: 07 December 2015
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-137-49764-2Published: 07 December 2015
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-49767-3Published: 08 December 2015
Series ISSN: 2945-6630
Series E-ISSN: 2945-6649
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 191
Topics: World History, Global and Transnational History, Cultural History, Modern History, Social History, Intellectual Studies