For many people the existence of God is by no means a sufficiently clear feature of reality. This problem, the fact of divine hiddenness, has been a source of existential concern and has sometimes been taken as a rationale for support of atheism or agnosticism. In this collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers of religion explore the question of divine hiddenness in considerable detail. The issue is approached from several perspectives including Jewish, Christian, atheist and agnostic. There is coverage of the historical treatment of divine hiddenness as found in the work of Maimonides, St. John of the Cross, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard, and various Biblical writers. A substantial introduction clarifies the main problems of and leading solutions to divine hiddenness. Primarily directed at philosophers of religion, theologians, and scholars of religious studies, this collection could also serve as a textbook for upper-level courses in philosophy of religion.
The formation of Modernist literature took place in a cultural climate characterised by an unprecedented collaboration between painters, sculptors, writers, musicians and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Within this multifaceted movement, William Carlos Williams is a paradigmatic case of a writer whose work was the result of a successful attempt at integrating ideas and concepts from the revolutionary visual arts. This book is a major step toward a fuller exploration of the connection between the visual arts and Williams' concept of the Modernist poem and of his achievement in transcending an art-for-art's-sake formalism to create poems which both reflect their own nature as a work of art and vividly evoke the world of that they are a part. As Williams' repeatedly stressed, 'It must not be forgot that we smell, hear and see with words and words alone and that with a new language we smell, hear and see afresh…'
Disjunctive Poetics examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time. Peter Quartermain suggests that the explosion of non-canonical modern writing is linked to the severe political, social and economic dislocation of non-English-speaking immigrants who, bringing alternative culture with them as they passed through Ellis Island in their hundreds of thousands at the turn of the century, found themselves uprooted from their traditions and dissociated from their cultures. The line of American poetry that runs from Gertrude Stein through Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists to the Language Writers, Quartermain contends, is not the constructive but the deconstructive aspect, which emphasises the materiality and ambiguity of the linguistic medium and the arbitrariness and openness of the creative process. Providing close reading of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Basil Bunting, Guy
Chamber's introduction to Beowulf is the most comprehensive study of the whole problem of this remarkable Anglo-Saxon manuscript. The original edition, published in 1921, began with a summary of the views held by previous writers on historical and non-historical elements in the poem, its date, origin and structure; this was followed by a collection of the Latin and Scandinavian documents furnishing parallels for various episodes and a detailed discussion of the Fight at Finnsberg and the relation of the Finn-episode in Beowulf and the relevance of archaeological finds. The second edition provided a supplement on work up to 1930 and an additional bibliography. This third edition, similarly, accounts for scholarship and publications since 1930. The Sutton Hoo discoveries of 1939, in particular, have made additions necessary. The original text remains unaltered since no major change of emphasis or interpretation is needed; but Professor Wrenn's new supplement and bibliography brings the b
Miguel Angel Asturias (1899–1974) is one of the notable literary figures in Latin America who in the 1920s contrived both to explore and to define Latin literature within the mainstream of Western history. He managed to be poetic, political and mythological at the same time, and with a degree of synthesis rarely achieved then or since. As is the case with many Latin American writers, his work is inextricably linked with politics, and he lived in exile for many years. He was influenced by Indian mythology, fantasy and Surrealism and was the first Latin American novelist to understand the implications of anthropology and structural linguistics for culture and for fiction. René Prieto examines how Miguel Angel Asturias turns to the cultural traditions of the ancient Maya and combines them with the rhetoric of surrealism in order to produce three highly complex and widely misunderstood masterpieces; the Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), Hombres de maiz (1949) and Mulata de tal (1963). Asturias
Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language continues to open up new approaches to Darwin's thought and to its effects in the culture of his contemporaries. This third edition includes an important new essay that investigates Darwin's concern with consciousness across all forms of organic life. It demonstrates how this fascination persisted throughout his career and affected his methods and discoveries. With an updated bibliography reflecting recent work in the field, this book will retain its place at the heart of Victorian studies.
Literary journalism is a rich field of study that has played an important role in the creation of the English and American literary canons. In this original and engaging study, Doug Underwood focuses on the many notable journalists-turned-novelists found at the margins of fact and fiction since the early eighteenth century, when the novel and the commercial periodical began to emerge as powerful cultural forces. Writers from both sides of the Atlantic are discussed, from Daniel Defoe to Charles Dickens, and from Mark Twain to Joan Didion. Underwood shows how many literary reputations are built on journalistic foundations of research and reporting, and how this impacts on questions of realism and authenticity throughout the work of many canonical authors. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students of British and American literature.
For centuries, poets have been ensnared - as one of their number, Andrew Marvell put it - by the beauty of flowers. Then, from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, that enjoyment was enriched by a surge of popular interest in botany. Besides exploring the relationship between poetic and scientific responses to the green world within the context of humanity's changing concepts of its own place in the ecosphere, Molly Mahood considers the part that flowering plants played in the daily lives and therefore in the literary work of a number of writers who could all be called poet-botanists: Erasmus Darwin, George Crabbe, John Clare, John Ruskin and D. H. Lawrence. A concluding chapter looks closely at the meanings, old or new, that plants retained or obtained in the violent twentieth century.
Gillian Beer's classic Darwin's Plots, one of the most influential works of literary criticism and cultural history of the last quarter century, is here reissued in an updated edition to coincide with the anniversary of Darwin's birth and of the publication of The Origin of Species. Its focus on how writers, including George Eliot, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy, responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language continues to open up new approaches to Darwin's thought and to its effects in the culture of his contemporaries. This third edition includes an important new essay that investigates Darwin's concern with consciousness across all forms of organic life. It demonstrates how this fascination persisted throughout his career and affected his methods and discoveries. With an updated bibliography reflecting recent work in the field, this book will retain its place at the heart of Victorian studies.
Dispatched to Sicily in 344 BC as an elderly man at the head of a small, motley band of mercenaries, Timoleon had no experience of the island. Yet, in less than eight years Timoleon overthrew tyrants, expelled the Carthaginians, and introduced peace, prosperity and constitutional government to an area which for decades had known only disorder. The peace he had brought was broken after his death, and tyranny returned in 317 BC; but the prosperity which he had set in motion continued to increase well into the third century. Dr Talbert has deliberately avoided the temptation to write a biography, and has confined himself to coverage of those aspects of Timeleon's work for which some evidence survives. He examines closely the uneven and frequently eulogistic accounts left by ancient writers. He also discusses fully the light thrown on Timoleon's revival by the discovery of numerous silver coin hoards in Sicily, and by archaeological excavations undertaken there since the Second World War.
Herodotus called his work an enquiry and wrote before 'history' was a separate discipline. Coming from Halicarnassus, at the crossroads between the Persian and Athenian spheres of influence, he combined the culture of Athens with that of the more pluralistic and less ethnocentric cities of east Greece. Alive to the implications of this cultural background for Herodotus' thought, this study explores the much neglected contemporary connotations and context of the Histories, looking at them as part of the intellectual climate of his time. Concentrating on Herodotus' ethnography, geography and accounts of natural wonders, and examining his methods of argument and persuasion, it sees the Histories, which appear virtually without antecedents, as a product of the late fifth-century world of the natural scientists, medical writers and sophists - a world of controversy and debate.
Essays by an international team of scholars in Latin literature and ancient philosophy explore the understanding of emotions (or 'passions') in Roman thought and literature. Building on work on Hellenistic theories of emotion and on philosophy as therapy, they look closely at the interface between ancient philosophy (especially Stoic and Epicurean), rhetorical theory, conventional Roman thinking and literary portrayal. There are searching studies of the emotional thought-world of a range of writers including Catullus, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, Statius, Tacitus and Juvenal. Issues of debate such as the ethical colour of Aeneas's angry killing of Turnus at the end of the Aeneid are placed in a broad and illuminating perspective. Written in clear and non-technical language, with Greek and Latin translated, the volume opens up a fascinating area on the borders of philosophy and literature.
“On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind.”The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his wa
The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde offers an essential introduction to one of the theatre's most important and enigmatic writers. Although a general overview, the volume also offers some of the latest thinking on the dramatist and his impact on the twentieth century. Part One places Wilde's work within the cultural and historical context of his time and includes an opening essay by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland. Further chapters also examine Wilde and the Victorians and his image as a Dandy. Part Two looks at Wilde's essential work as playwright and general writer, including his poetry, critiques, and fiction, and provides detailed analysis of such key works as Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest among others. The third group of essays examines the themes and factors which shaped Wilde's work and includes Wilde and his view of the Victorian woman, Wilde's sexual identities, and interpreting Wilde on stage. This 1997 volume also contains a detailed chronology of Wilde's w
Medieval discourses of masculinity and male sexuality were closely linked to the idea and representation of work as a male responsibility. Isabel Davis identifies a discourse of masculine selfhood which is preoccupied with the ethics of labour and domestic living. She analyses how five major London writers of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries constructed the male self: William Langland, Thomas Usk, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Hoccleve. These literary texts, while they have often been considered for what they say about the feminine role and identity, have rarely been thought of as evidence for masculinity; this study seeks to redress that imbalance. Looking again at the texts themselves, and their cultural contexts, Davis presents a genuinely fresh perspective on ideas about gender, labour and domestic life in medieval Britain.
This text was the first monograph to document and analyse the plays written by Black and Asian women in Britain. The volume explores how Black and Asian women playwrights theatricalize their experiences of migration, displacement, identity, racism and sexism in Britain. Plays by writers such as Tanika Gupta, Winsome Pinnock, Maya Chowdhry and Amrit Wilson, among others - many of whom have had their work produced at key British theatre sites - are discussed in some detail. Other playwrights' work is also briefly explored to suggest the range and scope of contemporary plays. The volume analyses concerns such as geographies of un/belonging, reverse migration (in the form of tourism), sexploitation, arranged marriages, the racialization of sexuality, and asylum seeking as they emerge in the plays, and argues that Black and Asian women playwrights have become constitutive subjects of British theatre.
In this publication, Brand traces the origin of the flaneur, a detached, casual, and powerful urban spectator, who regards the metropolis as an entertaining spectacle and text, of seventeenth-century English literature. He then discusses the development of the English language tradition of the flaneur in its social, cultural, and philosophical contexts. Taking the encounter with the spectator and city life as an important point of contact with modernity, Brand offers his own readings of three of the most important American writers of the nineteenth century, Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman, and the way in which, at various points in their work, each author represents a spectator who looks at a city crowd and responds to it as an entertaining spectacle, tracing the similarities and the differences that distinguish each author in his common search for literary forms adequate to the rush of city life.
This book, first published in 2000, traces the progress of Renaissance romance from a genre addressed to women as readers to a genre written by women. The Elizabethan period saw a boom in the publication of romances by male authors. Many of these, Helen Hackett argues, were directed at an imagined female audience, advertising to male readers the voyeuristic pleasures of fictions supposedly read in women's bedchambers. Yet within a hundred years this imagined audience gave way to real women romance-readers and even women romance-writers. Exploring this crucial transitional period, Hackett examines the work of a diverse range of writers from Lyly, Rich and Greene to Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Her book culminates in an analysis of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (1621), the first romance written by a woman and considers the developing representation of female heroism and selfhood, especially the adaptation of saintly roles to secular and even erotic purposes.
Essays by an international team of scholars in Latin literature and ancient philosophy explore the understanding of emotions (or 'passions') in Roman thought and literature. Building on work on Hellenistic theories of emotion and on philosophy as therapy, they look closely at the interface between ancient philosophy (especially Stoic and Epicurean), rhetorical theory, conventional Roman thinking and literary portrayal. There are searching studies of the emotional thought-world of a range of writers including Catullus, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, Statius, Tacitus and Juvenal. Issues of debate such as the ethical colour of Aeneas's angry killing of Turnus at the end of the Aeneid are placed in a broad and illuminating perspective. Written in clear and non-technical language, with Greek and Latin translated, the volume opens up a fascinating area on the borders of philosophy and literature.
The French Revolution strongly influenced the historical and political thought of nineteenth-century Britain. This study of the historiography of the Revolution demonstrates the successive stages of British opinion, and their relationship to other historical developments. Dr Ben-Israel examines the work of many English historians and thinkers who reflected on the French Revolution, and looks in particular detail at the work of those whose studies of the Revolution figure most prominently in this body of writings. Sinyth, Carlyle, Allson, Croker, Acton and others are considered both as individual writers and as part of a tradition. The author shows that the English historians had certain common aims and methods and above all shared a political point of view, so they can legitimately be grouped together to form a school. This book should be of particular interest to specialists in the French Revolution, historians of British public and political opinion, and students of historiographical
