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Notes
The book’s reception and sales were more instant and adulatory in the UK compared with the USA. Trilling commented on this in a letter to John Vaughan, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford: “You will be pleased to know that Sincerity and Authenticity is making something like a success here [UK] – I mean that it actually seems to be selling; the Oxford bookstores report that they cannot keep it in stock, the first time that anything like this has ever been said about a book of mine. In America, however, it has scarcely been reviewed.” Letter to John Vaughan, December 5, 1972, published in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling, edited by Adam Kirsch (2018: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York), p. 403.
See Nicholas Cronk’s Introduction to Denis Diderot Rameau’s Nephew (2006: Oxford University Press, Oxford) for an account of the text’s disappearance for nearly a hundred years and its remarkable reappearance in 1890 among the bouquinistes on Paris’s Quai de Voltaire.
The subject of madness was of much interest to Trilling, not least in his fiction; for example, his celebrated short story, “Of This Time, Of This Place,” gives a highly nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of the phenomenon. Moreover, his perception of the presence of a distinctive and powerful strain of madness in late modern thought overlaps with aspects of the work of more recent contributions to the subject by notable psychologists such as Louis Sass, especially his Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (1992: Basic Books, New York)
Leon Wieseltier, Introduction to Wieseltier ed. The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent: Selected Essays, Lionel Trilling (2000: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York), p. xv. According to Wieseltier, other exemplars of this night vision line of thought include Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Primo Levi and Isaiah Berlin.
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Lyons, J. Editor’s Introduction: A Complex Humanism. Soc 59, 489–493 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00770-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00770-4