This sixth and concluding volume of Huxley’s essays brings to completion what critics have applauded as “a remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited” (Jeffrey Hart). Here the reader will find Huxley’s final assessment of modern society. Revisiting the issues that informed his utopian nightmare, Brave New World, he addresses a broad range of contemporary topics, from ecology, sociobiology, and psychology to politics, history, and religion. His concern with the problems of modernity is everywhere evident. This volume includes his final meditation on art and religion (“Shakespeare and Religion”) as well as two recently discovered essays on science, technology, and “modern life.” Volume VI also marks Huxley’s intervention in the C. P. Snow / F. R. Leavis controversy of the “two cultures.” The relationship between science and humanistic culture was a vigorously contended issue in the early 1960s, drawing writers like Lionel Trilling and scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer into the debate. Huxley’s response was Literature and Science, his last book and a summation of his theory of art and culture. As one of the last of the modernist public intellectuals, his essays comprise a refiguration of modern cultural history in all its manifestations.
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