Download or read book The Wisdom of Ben Sira written by Patrick William Skehan and published by Anchor Bible. This book was released on 1987 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wisdom of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) contains the sayings of Ben Sira, arguably the last of Israel's wise men and its first professional scribe, whose world was defined and dominated by Greek ideas and ideals. This Hellenistic worldview challenged the adequacy of the religion passed down to the Palestinian Jews of the second century B.C.E. by their ancestors. Ben Sira's training in both Judaic and Hellenistic literary traditions prepared him to meet this challenge. He vigorously opposed any compromise of Jewish values; and his teachings bolstered the faith and confidence of his people. Through its elegant poetry and vehement exhortations, The Wisdom of Ben Sira exposes the ill effects of sinful behavior on one's health, status, and spiritual and material well-being. Ben Sira's rigorous code of moral behavior was the measure of Jewish faithfulness in an era of ethical and religious bankruptcy.

Download or read book The Fall of the Angels written by Christoph Auffarth and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2004 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fall of the Angels focuses on a biblical tradition whose significance has been recognised, elaborated and explored in literature and art outside the Bible. Its extensive influence on religion and culture during the last two millenia is reflected in the wide variety of interpretations of this tradition among communities as they came to terms with religious identity in the face of opposition.

Download or read book Shipwreck With Spectator written by Hans Blumenberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This elegant essay exemplifies Blumenberg's ideas about the ability of the historical study of metaphor to illuminate essential aspects of being human. Originally published in the same year as his monumental Work on Myth, Shipwreck with Spectator traces the evolution of the complex of metaphors related to the sea, to shipwreck, and to the role of the spectator in human culture from ancient Greece to modern times. The sea is one of humanity's oldest metaphors for life, and a sea journey, Blumenberg observes, has often stood for our journey through life. We all know the role that shipwrecks can play in this journey, and at some level we have all played witness to others' wrecks, standing in safety and knowing that there is nothing we can do to help, yet fixed comfortably or uncomfortably in our ambiguous role as spectator. Through Blumenberg's seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of letters, from ancient texts through nineteenth-century reminiscences and modern speeches, we see layer upon layer revealed in the meanings humans have given to these metaphors; and in this way we begin to understand what metaphors can do that more straightforward modes of expression cannot. This edition of Shipwreck with Spectator also includes "Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality", an essay that recounts the evolution of Blumenberg's ideas about metaphorology in the years following his early manifesto "Paradigms for a Metaphorology".

Download or read book The Lisbon Earthquake written by Thomas Downing Kendrick and published by . This book was released on 1957 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Theory of Narrative written by F. K. Stanzel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-07-19 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to provide a clear and systematic account of the complexities of fictional narration which result from the shifting relationship in all storytelling between the story itself and the way it is told.

Download or read book Handbook of Narratology written by Peter Hühn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-10-10 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in narratology and is now available in a second, completely revised and expanded edition. Detailed individual studies by internationally renowned narratologists elucidate central terms of narratology, present a critical account of the major research positions and their historical development and indicate directions for future research.

Download or read book Evil and the Devil written by Erkki Koskenniemi and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of evil has preoccupied world religions for centuries. The Old Testament contained no uniform dogma on evil powers, launching a fierce debate that has dominated theological and philosophical thought through the centuries to this day. Evil and the Devil brings together contributions from leading inter national scholars to chart that debate, tracing the history of evil from its origins in the Old Testament through early Judaism and the New Testament to the thought of Origen and one of the topic's most influential theologians, Augustine. What role did evil adopt in ancient Judaism? What impact did the association of miracles with demons have upon Matthew's Gospel? Evil and the Devil examines such questions, resulting in a fascinating and comprehensive exploration of portrayals of evil and its power and influence on religious thought.

Download or read book The Moravian Night written by Peter Handke and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe’s most provocative novelists, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer’s recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits places that represent stages of the narrator’s and the continent’s past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the Balkans to Spain, Germany, and Austria, from a congress of experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of jew’s-harp virtuosos. His story and its telling are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer and appears sometimes as a demon, sometimes as the longed-for destination of his travels. Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night explores the mind and memory of an aging writer, tracking the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of a life inseparable from the recent history of Central Europe. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke traces and interrogates his own thoughts and perceptions while endowing the world with a mythic dimension. As Jeffrey Eugenides writes, “Handke’s sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty amid this colorless world.” The Moravian Night is at once an elegy for the lost and forgotten and a novel of self-examination and uneasy discovery, from one of world literature’s great voices.

Download or read book Science on Stage written by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science on Stage is the first full-length study of the phenomenon of "science plays"--theatrical events that weave scientific content into the plot lines of the drama. The book investigates the tradition of science on the stage from the Renaissance to the present, focusing in particular on the current wave of science playwriting. Drawing on extensive interviews with playwrights and directors, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr discusses such works as Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. She asks questions such as, What accounts for the surge of interest in putting science on the stage? What areas of science seem most popular with playwrights, and why? How has the tradition evolved throughout the centuries? What currents are defining it now? And what are some of the debates and controversies surrounding the use of science on stage? Organized by scientific themes, the book examines selected contemporary plays that represent a merging of theatrical form and scientific content--plays in which the science is literally enacted through the structure and performance of the play. Beginning with a discussion of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the book traces the history of how scientific ideas (quantum mechanics and fractals, for example) are dealt with in theatrical presentations. It discusses the relationship of science to society, the role of science in our lives, the complicated ethical considerations of science, and the accuracy of the portrayal of science in the dramatic context. The final chapter looks at some of the most recent and exciting developments in science playwriting that are taking the genre in innovative directions and challenging the audience's expectations of a science play. The book includes a comprehensive annotated list of four centuries of science plays, which will be useful for teachers, students, and general readers alike.

Download or read book A Place in the Country written by W.G. Sebald and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Place in the Country is W. G. Sebald’s meditation on the six artists and writers who shaped his creative mind—and the last of this great writer’s major works to be translated into English. This edition includes more than 40 pieces of art, all originally selected by W. G. Sebald. This extraordinary collection of interlinked essays about place, memory, and creativity captures the inner worlds of five authors and one painter. In his masterly and mysterious style—part critical essay, part memoir—Sebald weaves their lives and art with his own migrations and rise in the literary world. Here are people gifted with talent and courage yet in some cases cursed by fragile and unstable natures, working in countries inhospitable or even hostile to them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is conjured on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion, hiding from his detractors on the island of St. Pierre, where two centuries later Sebald took rooms adjacent to his. Eighteenth-century author Johann Peter Hebel is remembered for his exquisite and delicate nature writing, expressing the eternal balance of both the outside world and human emotions. Writer Gottfried Keller, best known for his 1850 novel Green Henry, is praised for his prescient insights into a Germany where “the gap between self-interest and the common good was growing ever wider.” Sebald compassionately re-creates the ordeals of Eduard Mörike, the nineteenth-century German poet beset by mood swings, depression, and fainting spells in an increasingly shallow society, and Robert Walser, the institutionalized author whose nearly indecipherable scrawls seemed an attempt to “duck down below the level of language and obliterate himself” (and whose physical appearance and year of death mirrored those of Sebald’s grandfather). Finally, Sebald spies a cognizance of death’s inevitability in painter Jan Peter Tripp’s lovingly exact reproductions of life. Featuring the same kinds of suggestive and unexplained illustrations that appear in his masterworks Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, and translated by Sebald’s colleague Jo Catling, A Place in the Country is Sebald’s unforgettable self-portrait as seen through the experiences of others, a glimpse of his own ghosts alongside those of the men who influenced him. It is an essential addition to his stunning body of work. Praise for A Place in the Country “Measured, solemn, sardonic . . . hypnotic . . . [W. G. Sebald’s] books, which he made out of classics, remain classics for now.”—Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review “In Sebald’s writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death. The scholarly craft of gathering scattered sources and weaving them into a coherent whole is transformed here into something beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny—an art that was, in the end, Sebald’s strange and inscrutable gift.”—Slate “Magnificent . . . The multiple layers surrounding each essay are seamless to the point of imperceptibility.”—New York Daily News “Sebald’s most tender and jovial book.”—The Nation “Reading [A Place in the Country is] like going for a walk with a beautifully talented, deeply passionate novelist from Mars.”—New York

Download or read book The Great Code written by Northrop Frye and published by London : Routledge & Kegan Paul. This book was released on 1982 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Early H G Wells written by Bernard Bergonzi and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1961-12-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a sensitive study of Wells’ imaginative development during his formative years. It comes at a time when interest in H.G. Wells’ early writing is beginning to revive, owing, no doubt, to the current translation into reality of some aspects of science fiction. Mr. Bergonzi examines Wells’ early fiction, from surviving student writings of the late eighties to 1901 when he published The First Men in the Moon, his last significant scientific romance, and Anticipations, his first systematic non-fictional treatise. The main emphasis of his study falls on the scientific romances of the nineties, which are examined in detail. In addition to literary analysis, relevant source material and reviews, which show how contemporaries received Wells’ work, are noted. Wells’ early attitude to science is shown to have been deeply ambivalent, as is apparent in his successive uses of the Frankenstein archetype. His intellectual attitudes tended towards scepticism and pessimism rather than to the ‘utopian’ optimism associated with his later career. These romances reflect in imaginative and non-discursive form some of the major preoccupations of late-Victorian England: the impact of Darwinism, of Socialism, and an increasing lack of national self-confidence. Mr. Bergonzi sees Wells as essentially a fin de siècle myth-maker, and he argues that it is this aspect of Wells’ work which most requires attention if he is to be remembered in the future. Two early pieces by Wells, now unobtainable elsewhere, are given in an Appendix. One, The Chronic Argonauts, a fragment of a fantastic novel written at the age of 21, is the earliest draft of The Time Machine.

Download or read book Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs written by Jean-Charles Seigneuret and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1988 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This index is a veritable who's who of the greats of Western literature. . . . The Board recommends it for every collection whose users conduct analytical studies of literature. Reference Books Bulletin The powerful hold that literature exercises is based primarily on recognition--the reader's ability to identify with others through shared human concerns that transcend ttace, time, and cultural boundaries. These universal themes, and how they have been treated in literature from the classical period to the present, are the subject of the critical essays comprising this volume. A fascinating resource for students and general readers and an essential research tool for scholars in literature, it is the first thematic reference on this scale to be published in English. The dictionary consists of 143 essays contributed by 98 specialists in world literature. Topics covered include themes relating to adventure, family life, the supernatural, eroticism, status, humor, idealism, terror, and many other categories of human experience. Each entry begins with a defintion and a sketch on the origin and historical background of the literary theme. The topical essay discusses the significance and occurrence of the theme in world literature and supplies information on geographical area, genre, style, and chronology. Entries conclude with a selected bibliography of scholarship in the area. A cross-index to themes and motifs will enable the reader to find information on secondary or related topics. Convenient to use and presented in a standardized format, this major new reference will be an important acquisition for libraries with collections in English, American, and world literature.

Download or read book Theory of the Novel written by Guido Mazzoni and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his theory of the novel, Guido Mazzoni explains that novels consist of stories told in any way whatsoever about the experiences of ordinary men and women who exist as contingent beings within time and space. Novels allow readers to step into other lives and other versions of truth, each a small, local world, absolute in its particularity.

Download or read book The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy written by Gary Westfahl and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive three-volume reference work offers six hundred entries, with the first two volumes covering themes and the third volume exploring two hundred classic works in literature, television, and film.

Download or read book Unspeakable Sentences Routledge Revivals written by Ann Banfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1982, this title grew from a series of essays on various aspects of narrative style; the result is a finished product that melds literary theory with linguistic methodology. It is argued that, where linguistic theory intersects with literary theory, it is narrative that provides the crucial ‘experiment’ for deciding between a communication and a non-communication theory of language and, by extension, of literature. Chapters discuss such areas as subjectivity in direct and indirect speech, the absence of the narrator, and the development of narrative style. With a detailed introduction to the subject, this reissue will be of value to students of linguistics and literature with a particular interest in narrative style and linguistic theory.

Download or read book Shadows of the Future written by Patrick Parrinder and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1995-09-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: H. G. Wells—the inventor of the concept of the time machine and the phrase "the Shape of Things to Come"—described his life's work as one of "critical anticipation." Shadows of the Future identifies the attempt to imagine possible futures as the unifying principle behind Wells's diverse and sometimes wayward literary career. The book unravels the complex layers of meaning in The Time Machine, and shows how throughout his life he sought to exploit the potential of literary and cultural prophecy in new ways. Described by John Middleton Murry as "the last prophet of bourgeois Europe," he was also its first futurologist. In Shadows of the Future Wells's assumption of the prophet's role is related to his championship of the modern scientific outlook, and to the theory and practice of science fiction and utopian literature. Parrinder explores the connections between novelty and repetition, between imagining the future and imagining the past, and between prophecy and parody as literary modes. Wells's science fiction is reexamined both as a projection of the cosmology implicit in the writings of Darwin and Huxley, and as a new variation on the Romantic and Enlightenment themes of such earlier authors as Blake, Gibbon, and Mary Shelley. Later chapters relate Wells's fiction to his nonfiction and look at the uneasy relationship of his utopianism to literary prophecy, and at the paradoxes inherent in the militant internationalism of the " prophet at large." Finally, Wells's influence is traced in a study of the antiutopian fictions of Zamyatin and Orwell, and in a broad account of the connections between science fiction and the scientific outlook down to our own time.