Fans pick 100 books like The Pleasures of the Imagination

This book about rebels itself rebels against historians such as Abrams, who view Romanticism as a single movement unified by an expressive theory of art. 

Instead, Butler argues, there are many different sorts of Romantics, and they are best understood not through theories of art but through "the fierce personal and artistic politics of an age in the midst of profound change." That Age of Revolution had begun in the 1760s, and the ordering of the arts reflects debates about the social standing of the arts, not any consensus. Butler relishes these conflicts.

She pays attention to the groundswell of "art for the people" as well as "the war of the intellectuals," and she is not afraid to embrace the chaos and complications that thwart any effort to paint all arts and artists with one brush.

Hollander's wonderful book is a tribute to the power of music, which can transform ideas and myths into rhythms and feelings that immediately touch the heart. 

A fine poet himself, he relishes the quests of poets and musicians to turn mere words and notes into something divine, as if we could hearken to the gods (whether Christian or pagan). The analysis of particular works of art is always scholarly and penetrating; but more than that, it conveys a poet's love of what great artists have done.

In the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the mark of a true poet was to see things—to describe the visible and invisible worlds so vividly that everyone could see them too. 

Most modern readers are blind to this. But Jean Hagstrum teaches us how to see with eighteenth-century eyes. The pictures that poets make, and the paintings that inspire those visions, come alive in thoughtful readings that focus on the workshops of art: the schools where artists learn the craft of making what is imagined into something that seems real.

This classic study introduced me and the whole world of critics and scholars to theoretical perspectives that still resonate among historians of literature and culture. 

It defines a momentous change: the shift from views of art as a mirror—a reflection of things as they are—to a lamp—a radiant projection from the hearts and minds of its creators. This revolution in aesthetic principles, formulated by German and British theorists, also resulted in new ways of looking at nature and in new kinds of poetry. 

Abrams charts the depths of Romantic theory; and his work helped spur a revival of interest in the Romantics—now often cherished as the first modern poets.

Much of what we do and think comes from imagination, generated by our minds rather than by the physical world. This includes art, literature, music, religion, even science. Our dreams are spontaneous acts of creativity, and even memory itself can be distorted by the restless mind.  Fernandez-Armesto argues that many animals have better memories than we do, because the human system produces spontaneously creative thoughts at the expense of fidelity. That’s why memories are often false. The author is a historian with an interest in how the mind works, and his book is an amazingly comprehensive history of the human imagination.

Eric does a fantastic job of connecting Nordic and Scandinavian cultures with the Minnesotan and American cultures within my state. Living in Minnesota, I’m always interested in books that discuss cultural or societal norms like the ones I interact with on a daily basis.

I truly enjoyed broadening my knowledge on this search!

Several books focused on the Works Progress Administration (WPA), or discreet parts of it, had been published before Borchert’s was released but this is the best of them. I doubt that any other book will ever tell the story of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) quite so well. On one level, it lays out the project’s scope and walks readers through the politics involved with its creation and continued operation. And on another, it explains what the project meant for the writers it employed and how it influenced their work. Every other book on this list was written by an author employed by the project or another part of the WPA; this book will help you understand them as part of a coherent literary moment in American history.     

If you’re new to the history of Paris, this is an ideal book to start with. It’s a sweeping account of this fabled city’s story, from Roman times to the turn of the twenty-first century, but while lofty in aim it’s charmingly fun to read, the author being adept at packaging wide-ranging information into a fast-paced narrative. One neat feature is the way Jones highlights certain Parisians or Paris locations, giving them breakout sections that allow readers to delve deeper into the likes of Madame de Sévigné, Rose Bertin, and Josephine Baker. You realise that Paris is so much more than the sum of its stones. Yes, it’s about beautiful monuments, but just as much about the people who have breathed such life into Paris that their spirit lives on to this day.

Juan Villoro’s memoir takes readers on a tour of contemporary Mexico City that is also a meditation on chilangos’ (Mexico City residents) relationship with the past. The book bounces between the author’s childhood in the neighborhoods of Mixcoac and Del Valle and the present day, traversing the sprawling metropolis and giving readers a sense of its scale and complexity. Through Villoro, we meet the sewer cleaners and tire repairmen who keep the city humming. We visit monuments like the Angel of Independence and Chapultepec Castle and the bustling spaces of Santo Domingo Plaza and Tepito—places that seem to hover between past and present and myth and reality. At once spry and erudite, the book is an immensely satisfying rumination on the city and its people. 

I first encountered Spengler’s theories in work by science fiction writers such as A.E. Van Vogt and James Blish, who were enticed by Spengler’s notion that there was no single history of human civilization. Instead, distinct “Cultures” were born and slowly decayed into mere “Civilizations” by roughly predictable stages. Each Culture began with a fresh way of seeing and conceiving the world and our place in it, expressed in new art, politics, technology, and even mathematics.

The original inspiration was then lost and replaced by merely imitative and rule-governed art and society. Spengler certainly got a lot wrong, but I remain inspired by the notion that there are really different ways of being human and that—even if “the West” is bound, as other writers of the time expected, to decay—new lives, new Cultures will still emerge and flourish.

“Out of the spent and unconsidered earth,” in the poet Kipling’s words,… show more.