James Burrill Angell Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on James Burrill Angell

James Burrill Angell's literary scholarship has become a minor footnote in an active life that included political journalism, international diplomacy, and university administration. His output as a literary critic and scholar consists of a handful of periodical publications and a revised edition of the Hand-Book of French Literature: Historical, Biographical, and Critical (1857; originally published in London by Chambers in 1855). He based his literary criticism on the Scottish Common Sense philosophy he learned at Brown University during the 1840s. This perspective led him to dislike literature in which immoderate passion, trivial subject matter, dark or mystical romanticism, philosophical pessimism, and antireligious sentiment were to be found. As an intellectual conservative Angell viewed literature from a religious perspective; but as a scholar of French and German literature he tried to balance religion and aesthetics in his criticism. In addition, like the Cambridge Brahmins, Angell was a literature internationalist who believed that a nation's literature must be judged according to universally applicable criteria.

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