Download or read book This Long Pursuit written by Richard Holmes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author of The Age of Wonder and Falling Upwards, here is a luminous meditation on the art of biography that fuses the author’s own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction. In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime’s obsession with his Romantic subjects. It has become for him a pursuit, or pilgrimage of the heart, that has taken him across three centuries, through much of Europe, and into the lively company of many earlier biographers. Central to this quest is a powerful and tender evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and some almost lost to history: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. Holmes also investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary bard William Blake. The diversity of Holmes’s material is a testimony to his empathy, erudition, and inquiring spirit—and, sometimes, to his mischievous streak. The Long Pursuit gives us a unique insider’s account of a biographer at work: traveling, teaching, researching, fantasizing, forgetting, and even ballooning. From this great chronicler of the Romantics now comes a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.
Download or read book In Pursuit of the Brocken Spectre written by Neil Carroll and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Clouds written by Richard Hamblyn and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clouds have been objects of delight and fascination throughout human history, their fleeting magnificence and endless variety having inspired scientists and daydreamers alike. Described by Aristophanes as “the patron goddesses of idle men,” clouds and the ever-changing patterns they create have long symbolized the restlessness and unpredictability of nature, and yet they are also the source of life-giving rains. In this book, Richard Hamblyn examines clouds in their cultural, historic, and scientific contexts, exploring their prevalence in our skies as well as in our literature, art, and music. As Hamblyn shows, clouds function not only as a crucial means of circulating water around the globe but also as a finely tuned thermostat regulating the planet’s temperature. He discusses the many different kinds of clouds, from high, scattered cirrus clouds to the plump thought-bubbles of cumulus clouds, even exploring man-made clouds and clouds on other planets. He also shows how clouds have featured as meaningful symbols in human culture, whether as ominous portents of coming calamities or as ethereal figures giving shape to the heavens, whether in Wordsworth’s poetry or today’s tech speak. Comprehensive yet compact, cogent and beautifully illustrated, this is the ultimate guidebook to those shapeshifters of the sky.
Download or read book Coleridge s Later Poetry written by Morton D. Paley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems that Coleridge wrote after his "golden" period are seldom studied or anthologized. Yet many of these later poems are of quality and interest, addressing such universal themes as the nature of self and the experience of unrequited love. Paley examines the later verse in the context of Coleridge's oeuvre. He discusses its distinguishing characteristics, and looks at why the poet felt he had to develop distinctively different modes of writing for these works.
Download or read book Outlandish written by Nick Hunt and published by Nicholas Brealey. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Outlandish, acclaimed travel writer Nick Hunt takes us across landscapes that should not be there, wildernesses found in Europe yet seemingly belonging to far-off continents: a patch of Arctic tundra in Scotland; the continent's largest surviving remnant of primeval forest in Poland and Belarus; Europe's only true desert in Spain; and the fathomless grassland steppes of Hungary. From snow-capped mountain range to dense green forest, desert ravines to threadbare, yellow open grassland, these anomalies transport us to faraway regions of the world. More like pockets of Africa, Asia, the Poles or North America, they make our own continent seem larger, stranger and more filled with secrets. Against the rapid climate breakdown of deserts, steppes and primeval jungles across the world, this book discovers the outlandish environments so much closer to home - along with their abundant wildlife: reindeer; bison; ibex; wolves and herds of wild horses. Blending sublime travel writing, nature writing and history - by way of Paleolithic cave art, reindeer nomads, desert wanderers, shamans, Slavic forest gods, European bison, Wild West fantasists, eco-activists, horseback archers, Big Grey Men and other unlikely spirits of place - these desolate and rich environments show us that the strange has always been near.
Download or read book Romanticism Medicine and the Natural Supernatural written by Gavin Budge and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating interdisciplinary study examines the relationship between literary interest in visionary kinds of experience and medical ideas about hallucination and the nerves in the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on canonical Romantic authors, the work of women writers influenced by Romanticism, and visual culture.
Download or read book Selected Poetry written by Samuel Coleridge and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-06-26 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living in a revolutionary age, Coleridge's poetry was written in a spirit of moral and emotional inquiry into the absolutes of the human condition. He is best known for his visionary poetry ('Kubla Khan') and his ballads ('The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'), but he used and transformed a variety of verse forms, from the sonnet to the conversation poem, on subjects as diverse as nature, love, and politics. This selection calls attention to the range of Coleridge's work, its strong autobiographical content,and its artistic development throughout his career. The old chronological form has been abandoned and the poems are organised according to genre, with each section displaying its own individual development in craft and theme.
Download or read book The Forum written by Lorettus Sutton Metcalf and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current political, social, scientific, education, and literary news written about by many famous authors and reform movements.
Download or read book Phantasmagoria written by Marina Warner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With over thirty illustrations in color and black and white, Phantasmagoria takes readers on an intellectually exhilarating tour of ideas of spirit and soul in the modern world, illuminating key questions of imagination and cognition. Warner tells the unexpected and often disturbing story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self in modern times. She probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception, and uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture.
Download or read book Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence written by John Holmes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti published the first version of his sonnet sequence The House of Life. The next thirty years saw the greatest flourishing of the sonnet sequence since the 1590s. John Holmes's carefully researched and eloquent study illuminates how leading sonneteers, including the Rossettis, John Addington Symonds, Wilfrid Blunt and Augusta Webster, and their early twentieth-century successors Rosa Newmarch and Rupert Brooke, addressed the urgent questions of selfhood, religious belief and doubt, and sexual and national identity which troubled late Victorian England. Drawing on the heritage of the sonnet sequence, the poetic self-portraits they created are unsurpassed in their subtlety, complexity, courage, and honesty.
Download or read book A Dictionary of Ghosts written by Peter Haining and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dictionary of Ghosts defines all the various types of apparitions and creatures of superstition known through the centuries. Recounting legends of famous hauntings, it introduces you to the many mediums, authorities, and victims associated with ghosts. Now you can learn about the domovoys, noisy Russian spirits who are willing to do household chores; Lord Byron's encounters with a phantom monk; and the Hairy Hands ghost who is said to strangle travellers--along with banshees, poltergeists, exorcisms, screaming skulls, UFOs, and all the other intriguing phenomena that have raised hair on the heads of believers and non-believers around the world.
Download or read book In Search of Mary Shelley written by Fiona Sampson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know the facts of Mary Shelley’s life in some detail—the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person—what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did—despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life.In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.
Download or read book The Aerial World written by Georg Hartwig and published by New York, D. Appleton and Company. This book was released on 1875 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Joan of Arc written by Wilfred Thomas Jewkes and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...we offer in this book a collection of the best writing about her [Joan of Arc], ranging from the objective accounts of the trial and the retrial to the most imaginative flights of dramatic vision, in the hope that a study of them may provide food both for thought and for writing."--Introduction.
Download or read book The Last of the Soul Searchers written by David W. Ashby and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2021-04-16 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shaun MacGregor is a complex man who struggles with alcoholism and relationships with women. He becomes involved in a battle for the control of Earth. Groomed by his mentor, John Running Bull, Shaun assists the alien Arcturians in saving humanity from the evil Annunaki. With his psychic abilities, Shaun mediates the transformation of evil humans controlled by the Annunaki, changing monsters into harmless clones by presenting them to the Arcturians for adjustments to their souls. Shaun’s stepfather, Mike “Mad Dog” MacGregor, who appears as a human, is the supreme leader of the Annunaki. A retired Air Force colonial, Mad Dog plots to wipe out humanity, so that his people may colonize Earth. The colonel has long viewed Shaun as his nemesis because Shaun is a Nephilim--half human and half Arcturian. He soon threatens Shaun’s existence. With the help of John Running Bull and the ex-Annunaki cyborg Bart, Shaun, and his new love interest Vicki kayak sixty miles to the point deep in the Red River Gorge area in Eastern Kentucky where they are extracted to safety. Along the way down the river, the group experiences many dangers, including learning of the Annunaki’s plan to wipe out humanity by transforming the Earth’s atmosphere so that it is unable to support human life by replacing oxygen with methane gas and carbon dioxide, perfect for the Annunaki. Human activities such as hydraulic fracturing and fossil fuel consumption have long been wrecking the Earth, but the process is taking too long. Nubira, home planet of the Annunaki, is rapidly being destroyed as their sun turns into a supernova. In addition to speeding up the destruction of the planet, Mad Dog MacGregor urges his cohorts to release a virus via their Annunaki Manchurian candidate in Wuhan, China, thus expediting the complete demise of the human species. Extraction is complete when Shaun and Vicki escape by jumping off Seventy Six Falls near Lake Cumberland in Kentucky. There the pair are forced into a wormhole that deposits them into the decade of the 1950s. Such time travel is the Arcturians’ version of a cosmic witness protection plan. When Shaun and Vicki arrive in the 50s, their identities are altered, but not their souls. Shaun becomes a famous writer and uses his influence for good. Finally, Shaun makes it back to the year 2020, and is faced with horrors that threaten his sanity, and threatens his ability to protect humanity from the evils of the Annunaki. Will Shaun survive long enough to save the planet, or will he become just another instrument in the Annunaki conquest of earth.
Download or read book Chatterbox written by and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Forum and Column Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
