GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON (1874-1936)
was one of the great masters of English literature and his impact
upon the radical politics and economics of the early twentieth
century was nothing short of monumental. A prodigious and unremitting
talent, G. K. Chesterton wrote more than eighty books and continues
to inspire and capitivate modern readers with his enduring
witticisms, flowing poetry, curious paradoxes and uncompromising
apologetics. Chesterton is probably best remembered for his popular
journal, G. K.'s Weekly, as well as his unswerving devotion to
Catholicism, to which he finally converted in 1922. Together with his
great friend and ally, Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), he formed the
Distributist League as a dynamic alternative to the destructive
ideologies of Capitalism and Marxism. Chesterton, who invited
accusations of anti-Semitism when he famously praised King Edward I
(1239-1307) for having expelled crooked Jewish financiers from
English shores in 1290, participated in a series of thrilling debates
with some of the other leading philosophers and social commentators
of the time, among them the playwright George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950) and novelist H. G. Wells (1866-1946). Towards the end of
his life, meanwhile, Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) made him Knight
Commander with Star of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great and
there is an ongoing campaign to have the author beatified. Some of G.
K. Chesterton's best-loved works include Charles Dickens (1903), The
Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Club of Queer Trades (1905),
Heretics (1905), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), Orthodoxy (1908),
All Things Considered (1908), Tremendous Trifles (1909), The Ball and
the Cross (1909), What's Wrong With the World (1910), The Ballad of
the White Horse (1911), The Flying Inn (1914), A Short History of
England (1917), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), Eugenics and other
Evils (1922), St. Francis of Assisi (1923), Tales of The Long Bow
(1925), The Everlasting Man (1925), The Outline of Sanity (1926), The
Poet and the Lunatics (1929), All I Survey (1933), St. Thomas
Aquinas: The Dumb Ox (1933), Avowals and Denials (1934),
Autobiography (1936), As I Was Saying (1936), and the extremely
popular Father Brown stories. Topics discussed in the present work
include Neither Progressive nor Conservative: The Anti-Modernism of
G. K. Chesterton; Discovering England: Dialogues on Orthodoxy; Learn
from the Cave-man: Chesterton's View of Man and his History;
Tribalism and Decentralism in The Napoleon of Notting Hill; Symbolum
Apostolicum: Chesterton's Dreamworld; A Third Way Which is Right; The
Importance of Chesterton Today; and Eugenics as a Manifestation of
Modernity: A Chestertonian Critique. The contributors are Troy
Southgate (Editor), K. R. Bolton, Keith Preston, John Howells,
Stephen M. Borthwick, Dimitris Michalopoulos and Adam Berčík.
April 2013, Black Front Press,
paperback, 176pp. Cover Designed by Jeff Harrison.
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