...poet Marthew Arnold, in the 1680s, as 'culture'. Culture, for Arnold, was a normative value: it was 'the best which has been thought and said in the world', 'the passion for sweerness and light', 'the study of perfection', harmonious and general; it was 'tight...

..."partiality of interestedness," not the "totality" of vision that culture now had to stand in for (252). "The best which has been thought and said in the world" — the hierarchical, evaluative idea of culture and aesthetics that Arnold's name has come to evoke — was...

...important than conveying to promising members of the rising generation what Matthew Arnold described as "the best which has been thought and said in the world." The human products of such education would take their places among the "cultured" and be prepared for positions...

...view it was Matthew Arnold who gave this view its most persuasive expression in saying that it was "a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world."33 It is...

...the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties: culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through...

...national. National culture is often equated with high culture as in Matthew Arnold's definition (1993:190): "the best which has been thought and said in the world." The Arnoldian sense of Japanese culture evokes kabuki and tea ceremony, in which very few Japanese people...

...those works can facilitate. After all, Arnold's famous definition in its fuller context reads, "The pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting...us, the best which has been thought and said in the world," and, importantly, the sentence continues, "and through this knowledge, turning a stream of...

...this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords' (70). Instead, culture is the 'pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting...us, the best which has been thought and said in the world' (6). More specifically, culture can produce national consolidation, secured by state institutions....

...the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through...

...such things and many others that they stand for are still widely enjoyed. But what of 'Culture [as] a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world'. Elsewhere,...