In this stimulating study, the author explores how Conrad, T.S.Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Huxley and others responded to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith. Assuming that artists and writers, in coping with those problems, would develop techniques in many ways comparable, even where there was no direct contact, he positions Modernist literature within the context of contemporary painting, architecture and sculpture, thereby providing some fascinating insights into the nature of the literary works themselves.

The scientific achievements of the modern world failed to impress the leading writers of this century, leaving them instead profoundly disturbed by a sense of lost values and of the insignificance of the individual in a universe seemingly indifferent to human concerns. In The Search for Selfhood in Modern Literature Roston explores the strategies adopted by such mid-century authors as Greene, Salinger, Osborne, Baldwin and others in their attempt to cope with the spiritual vacuity - strategies including the emergence of the anti-hero and of literary existentialism - and offer in the course of the investigation fascinatingly new insights into their work.

Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting "primal scene" of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice. Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female—Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. Glory and Agony traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.

‘This book is a tribute to [Stein’s] appreciation of the land of his adoption and, to those who knew him, it is a monument to his penetrative powers of spiritual perception.’ – A.P. Shepherd At a time when British identity is being reassessed and questioned, W.J. Stein’s classic and timeless study, with its penetrative analysis of the character, psychology and destiny of the British people, takes on new relevance. Stein, a political refugee from Austria, spent the last 24 years of his life in Britain. As an outsider, he was able to view British custom and culture with objectivity. As a student of Rudolf Steiner, he brought years of spiritual study and wisdom to the writing of this book, enabling profound insights. In this concise and aphoristic study, Stein writes on everything from geography, history, politics and economics to the arts (in particular painting and music) and religion. He also reflects on the British concept of freedom, as well as Great Britain’s somewhat mysterious propensity to extend itself – and its language and culture – across the world. ‘Amidst the international turmoils of today the Delphic word can be heard to resound from all sides, in its metamorphosed form: “Know yourselves as folk-souls!” Stein’s little book is an invaluable contribution to such a super-individual self-knowledge.’ – T.H. Meyer