Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

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Matthew Arnold's role in developing the modern usage of the term “culture”, which has since become ubiquitous in literary and socio-political discourse, is one of his most important contributions as a man of letters, and it is intimately tied to his own growth and development as a writer (DeLaura 1988). Use of the term was already fairly common among English writers and intellectuals in the 1850s, the underlying idea of “cultivation” having become moralized and detached from its original agricultural sense in the writings of Southey and Coleridge early in the century (Williams 1958; Connell 2001), but it was closely associated with the German word

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and its English equivalents, self-development and self-cultivation. That is, “culture” usually meant “self-culture”,…

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Citation: Machann, Clinton John. "Culture and Anarchy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 April 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9666, accessed 19 March 2024.]

9666 Culture and Anarchy 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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