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Being exposed to the Nominalist expansion in early modernity, Petrarch and Shakespeare are highly preoccupied with a Nominalist dimension of language and representation. Against this background, the study shows how these Renaissance poets advanced a special notion of subjectivity and identity as rooted in negativity, otherness, and representation. The book thus argues for a new understanding of negative modes of subjectivity in Petrarch and Shakespeare. A new and sharpened understanding emerging from an interpretation of Francesco Petrarch’s notion of exile and of love in his great poetical cycle Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as well as a meticulous examination of the concept of nothingness in William Shakespeare’s works. Petrarch and Shakespeare poetically show how identity is alien and decentred – yet also free and expanding. In other words, these poets illustrate how subjectivity is constituted by heterogeneity. Moreover, pointing to other examples of this negative subjectivity in Renaissance philosophy and poetry, the study suggests that these models for subjectivity could be extended to other early modern writers.
When nineteen-year-old Matthew Lewis crafted The Monk in 1796, he had no idea what hideous progeny he had created. The text plagued Lewis throughout his life to the point where he earned the nickname "Monk" Lewis, symbolic of criticism he and the text received equating Lewis directly with the ideas in his infamous gothic novel. The Monk rose to the pinnacle of popularity in an England consumed by its love for Gothic romances and enswathed in the language of political, social, and religious turmoil. In addition, Lewis's novel has endured centuries of criticism to become part of the twenty-first century's love affair with the Gothic. Elements in Lewis's novel have spoken to humankind across th...
This book conducts a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of Franz Kafka’s relation to China. Commencing with an examination of the myriad Chinese cultural influences to which Kafka was exposed, it goes on to explore the ways in which they manifest themselves in canonical stories, such as Description of A Struggle, The Great Wall of China, and An Old Manuscript. This leads the way to thought-provoking comparative studies of Kafka and major Chinese writers and philosophers, such as Zhuang Tzu, Pu Songling, Qian Zhongshu, and Lu Xun. Highlighting kindred philosophical concepts, shared aesthetic tastes, and parallel narrative strategies, these comparisons transcend mere textual analysis, to explore the profound cultural, historical, and philosophical implications of Kafka’s works. Finally, the book turns to an examination Kafka’s impact on modern life in China, including its translation studies, literature, and even its mass culture.
A global study of the psychospiritual body and its central role in the esoteric and spiritual traditions of the world • Explains the nature, purpose, and functions of the subtle body • Explores the role of the subtle body in such traditions as Alchemy, Ayurveda, Tantra, Qi Gong, and Yoga • Shows how the various layers of the subtle body provide a map for various levels of consciousness Ancient traditions of both the East and West have long maintained that the human being is a complex of material and nonmaterial systems, or energy bodies. The “subtle body” is an energetic, psychospiritual entity of several layers of increasing subtlety and metaphysical significance through which the...
Jordan Cofer examines the influence of the Bible upon Flannery O'Connor's fiction. While there are many studies exploring how her Catholicism affected her fiction, this book argues that O'Connor is heavily influenced by the Bible itself. Specifically, it explicates the largely undocumented ways in which she used the Bible as source material for her work. It also shows that, rhetorically, many of O'Connor's stories (and/or characters) are based upon biblical models. Furthermore, Cofer explains how O'Connor's stories engage their biblical analogues in unusual, unexpected, and sometimes grotesque ways, as her stories manage to convey essentially the same message as their biblical counterparts. ...
In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka's work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche's conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others. Even as Corngold explores Kafka's work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka's ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.
A lonely damsel imprisoned within a castle or convent cell. The eavesdropping of a prisoner next door. The framed image of a woman with a sinister past. These familiar tropes from 1790s novels and tales exploded onto the English literary scene in 'low-brow' titles of Gothic romance. Surprisingly, however, they also re-emerged as features of major Victorian poems from the 1830s to 1870s. Such signature tropes - inquisitional overhearing; female confinement and the damsel in distress; supernatural switches between living and dead bodies - were transfigured into poetic forms that we recognise and teach today as canonically Victorian. The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry identifies a poetics of Gothic enclosure constitutive of high Victorian poetry that came to define key nineteenth-century poetic forms, from the dramatic monologue, to women's sonnet sequences and metasonnets, to Pre-Raphaelite picture poems.
This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui – all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society's moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.
Ireland is a country which has come to be defined in part by an ideology which conflates nationalism with the land. From the Irish Revival’s celebration of the Irish peasant farmer as the ideal Irishman to the fierce history of land claim battles between the Irish and their colonizers, notions of the land have become particularly bound up with conceptions of what Ireland is and what it is to be Irish. In this book, Wright considers this fraught relationship between land and national identity in Irish literature. In doing so, she presents a new vision of the Irish national landscape as one that is vitally connected to larger geographical spheres. By exploring issues of globalization, intern...