Subtitled: An attack on the dogmatic orthodoxy of T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis, and others.
In Hans Andersen's fairy-tale, the Emperor parades proudly in what his tailor assures him is a suit of clothes visible only to the eyes of the innocent. Much of modern literature is decked out in a new scholasticism, and just as the child in the story revealed that the Emperor was strutting around naked, so Miss Nott shows the pseudo-religious revival for what it is - an attempt to persuade this age yo disregard the evidence of its own eyes.
One of the first of the Emperor's tailors was T.E. Hulme, who reduced Christian morality to the dogma of Original Sin and the Fall, and who tried to set up two distinct and opposed orders of truth. The author shows that the object of Hulme and his successors is to discard all philosophical development since the Renaissance.
Miss Nott discusses in detail the critical essays of T.S. Eliot and his statement that we have never recovered from the "dissociation of poetic sensibility" which took place in the seventeenth century, and the work of Basil Willey and others who, following Eliot, blame the impact of the scientific method for the weakening of poetic faith. Other writers, including Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers, are also dealt with.
Herself a poet and novelist of distinction, Miss Nott includes in her book a discussion of the relation of the science to poetry and an outline of a literary philosophy based on humanism.
This book is an ex-library book. There are signs of shelf wear and some small tears to the front, back and spine of the dust jacket. Internally, the pages are clean and the binding is tight.