This book explores the ways that critics writing in the early nineteenth century developed arguments in favour of the humanities in the face of utilitarian pressures that dismissed the arts as self-indulgent pursuits incapable of addressing real-world problems. In doing so, it helps to explain the historical origins of the current difficult situation in the humanities and why the present sense of crisis differs markedly from earlier ones, but also has deep and edifying historical roots in the debates and stakes of the nineteenth-century problems this book examines. weiterlesen