Reactionary Imperative

In the Preface to The Reactionary Imperative, Bradford notes that no calculated premeditation on his part produced the focal, rhetorical, and thematic unity apparent in the nineteen essays that make up this volume. Yet after collecting the essays, he discovered that he had "said the same things [in each of the various essays], though in different ways," thus producing a unity of effect or the appearance of conscious thematic design. The unity and integrity of Bradford's essays derive from the following circumstance: a conservative, prescriptive man finds himself living in an ideological, progressive era hostile to convention and tradition in literature, culture, and politics. The result is reaction. Bradford explains in the Preface: “The arguments of most of these papers stand in some reactive relation to the modern spirit of private judgment, solipsism and assertive alienation which has its literary apotheosis in the figure of Stephen in Joyce's Portrait, its intellectu