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FeaturesOctober 2001 The battle of the book: the research library today by Eric Ormsby The second in a series titled “The survival of culture” In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France a boisterous debate, traditionally known as the “Battle of the Books,” raged for many decades. The issue at stake was one of style: should we accept the “Antients” (to use Jonathan Swift’s spelling) as our models and exemplars in matters literary, given their immemorial legacy of acutely expressive prose and verse, or should we rather forge a “Modern” style and manner befitting our own age and its peculiar requirements and contingencies? Charles Perrault in France in the 1695 preface to his Contes sided resolutely with the moderns, and this on moral grounds: the ancient fables taught a destructive morality. Interestingly enough, he singled out the pernicious effects of certain misogynistic classical tales on young girls’ moral nature and declared: “I maintain that my fables deserve more to be related than most of the ancient tales &he ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 October 2001, on page 4 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-battle-of-the-book--the-research-library-today-2110
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by Eric Ormsby On “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
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