In The Pragmatist Turn, renowned scholar of American literature and thought Giles Gunn offers a new critical history of the way seventeenth-century religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment influenced the formation of subsequent ...

Drawing throughout on the work of William James, Henry James, Sr., John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Clifford Geertz, Frank Lentricchia, Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, and others, Gunn shows ...

In this text Giles Gunn asks how human solidarity can be reconceived when its expressions have become increasingly exceptionalist and outmoded, and when the pressures of globalization divide as much as they unify.

'An elegantly written and, at points, passionately argued examination of the relation of criticism to culture in the modern world. The strengths of the book are many: it is vigorously argued, immensely learned, and cogent.

Studies the ways in which imaginative literature expresses religious meaning and considers the contribution of literary criticism to religious scholarship, maintaining that a reciprocity exists between literature and religion.

Situating his discussion in an emphatically global context, Gunn shows how cosmopolitanism has been effective in resisting such essentialisms and authoritarianisms precisely because it is more pragmatic than prescriptive, more self-critical ...

In a unique and probing analysis, this study examines the function of literary criticism in religious studies and explores the relation of literature to religion in the works of major American writers.

In this narrativized collection of his essays, Gunn introduces each one with a set of comments designed to explain his goal when first writing them and what they mean to him now.

Situating his discussion in an emphatically global context, Gunn shows how cosmopolitanism has been effective in resisting such essentialisms and authoritarianisms precisely because it is more pragmatic than prescriptive, more self-critical ...