Download or read book Recollecting Dante s Divine Comedy in the Novels of Mark Helprin written by Sara MacDonald and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies several of Mark Helprin’s novels in terms of their relation to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The authors demonstrate that A Soldier of the Great War, In Sunlight and in Shadow, and Winter’s Tale substantially correspond to, respectively, Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The author himself has acknowledged his debt to Dante and references to the Comedy appear throughout his works. It is not that Helprin’s novels track their Dantean antecedents slavishly, or even follow the structure of the Canticles explicitly. Rather, the central arguments of Dante’s three works are taken up by Helprin in his novels. In adopting Dante’s essentially Platonic doctrine of mediation, Helprin’s characters are fully instantiated human beings who also mediate and reveal the divine. In his engagement with Dante, Helprin affirms the core philosophical, theological and psychological arguments of the Comedy, and then modifies those arguments in a distinctly modern way. Specifically, Helprin focuses on human freedom as the necessary precondition for justice to exist, both for individuals and for societies. In the final chapter of the book, the authors turn to Helprin’s Freddy and Fredericka. In this novel, Helprin both assumes Dante’s argument, and then radically alters it, by pointing to the possibility of a just regime on earth, rather than one that exists merely in heaven. While accepting much of Dante’s metaphysical argument, Helprin shows the virtues of liberal democracy as that form of political regime that is most able to unite human eros with eternal principles. In the end, Helprin’s novels are remarkable for the way in which they advocate for ancient virtues, while insisting upon the distinctly modern liberal account of human freedom as the necessary foundation for human flourishing.
Download or read book Recollecting Dante s Divine Comedy in the Novels of Mark Helprin written by Barry Craig and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the novels of writer Mark Helprin in relation to Dante's Divine Comedy by demonstrating that Helprin's novels are both popular works of literature and serious explorations of philosophical and political themes. In the end, Helprin's novels offer a robust defense of liberal democracy, while advocating for ancient virtue.
Download or read book Mad Men written by Sara MacDonald and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For seven seasons, AMC’s Mad Men captivated audiences with the story of Don Draper, an advertising executive whose personal and professional successes and failures took viewers on a roller coaster ride through America’s tumultuous 1960s. More than just a television show about one of advertising’s “bad boys,” the series investigates the principles of the American regime, exploring whether or not the American Dream is a sustainable vision of human flourishing and happiness. This collection of essays investigates the show’s engagement with the philosophic and political foundations of American democracy.
Download or read book The Christian Science Monitor Index written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Memoir From Antproof Case written by Mark Helprin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007-08-06 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An old man recounts the raucous adventure of his life through war, obsession and the 20th century in this “rapturous and melancholy new novel” (The New York Times). An old American who lives in Brazil is writing his memoirs. Call him Oscar Progresso—or whatever else you like. He sits in a mountain garden in Niterói, overlooking the ocean. As he reminisces and writes, placing the pages carefully in his antproof case, an epic adventure unfolds. We learn that he was a World War II ace who was shot down twice, an investment banker who met with popes and presidents, and a man who was never not in love. But that doesn’t begin to cover our narrator’s immense and fascinating journey through the 20th century. He was also the thief of the century, a murderer, and a protector of the innocent. All his life he waged a valiant, losing, one-man battle against the world’s most insidious enslaver: coffee. The acclaimed author of Winter’s Tale and A soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin now offers “a tour de force that combines adventure, romance and an overview of the 20th century into a bittersweet narrative” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Download or read book Paris in the Present Tense written by Mark Helprin and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Helprin’s powerful, rapturous new novel is set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories. Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour—a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust—must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present. In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life—days bright with music, family, rowing on the Seine—Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist a third his age. Against the backdrop of an exquisite and knowing vision of Paris and the way it can uniquely shape a life, he forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth.In the intoxicating beauty of its prose and emotional amplitude of its storytelling, Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory.
Download or read book Return to Good and Evil written by Henry T. Edmondson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2005-03-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Flannery O'Connor is hailed as one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century American south, few appreciate O'Connor as a philosopher as well. In Return to Good and Evil, Henry T. Edmondson introduces us to a remarkable thinker who uses fiction to confront and provoke us with the most troubling moral questions of modern existence. 'Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul, ' O'Connor once said, in response to the nihilistic tendencies she saw in the world around her. Nihilism--Nietzche's idea that 'God is dead'--preoccupied O'Connor, and she used her fiction to draw a tableau of human civilization on the brink of a catastrophic moral, philosophical, and religious crisis. Again and again, O'Connor suggests that the only way back from this precipice is to recognize the human need for grace, redemption, and God. She argues brilliantly and persuasively through her novels and short stories that the Nietzschean challenge to the notions of good and evil is an ill-conceived effort that will result only in disaster. With rare access to O'Connor's correspondence, prose drafts, and other personal writings, Edmondson investigates O'Connor's deepest motivations through more than just her fiction and illuminates the philosophical and theological influences on her life and work. Edmondson argues that O'Connor's artistic brilliance and philosophical genius reveal the only possible response to the nihilistic despair of the modern world: a return to good and evil through humility and grace.
Download or read book No Country for Old Men written by Lynnea Chapman King and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-08-03 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2005, Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men, was published to wide acclaim, and in 2007, Ethan and Joel Coen brought their adaptation of McCarthy's novel to the screen. The film earned praise from critics worldwide and was honored with four Academy Awards', including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. In No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, scholars offer varied approaches to both the novel and the award-winning film. Beginning with several essays dedicated entirely to the novel and its place within the McCarthy canon, the anthology offers subsequent essays focusing on the film, the adaptation process, and the Coen Brothers more broadly. The book also features an interview with the Coen brothers' long-time cinematographer Roger Deakins. This entertaining and enriching book for readers interested in the Coen Brothers' films and in McCarthy's fiction is an important contribution to both literature and film studies.
Download or read book In Sunlight and in Shadow written by Mark Helprin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Returning home after serving World War II to run his family business in New York, a paratrooper falls in love with a young heiress and actress he meets on the State Island ferry.
Download or read book The Veil of Snows written by Mark Helprin and published by Viking Juvenile. This book was released on 1997 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a daring girl's quest to avenge the murder of her parents.
Download or read book Expect Resistance written by and published by CrimethInc. Collective. This book was released on 2008 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expect Resistance is not one but three books, each of which may be read as a complete work unto itself. The first book, printed in standard black ink, continues the inquiry into modern life and its discontents begun in Days of War, Nights of Love, Just as that book included improved versions of texts originally published between 1996 and 1999, this book draws on CrimethInc. material from 2000 to 2004, painstakingly refined and augmented with a great deal of new content. The second book, in red ink, is a composite account, related by three narrators, of the adventures and tribulations that inevitably ensue when people pursuing their dreams enter into conflict with the world as it is.
Download or read book A City in Winter written by Mark Helprin and published by Viking Juvenile. This book was released on 1996 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Driven to avenge the murder of her royal parents and reclaim their lost kingdom, a daring young princess confronts the city's conqueror, the Usurper, with the aid of two unlikely rebels. 150,000 first printing. $150,000 ad/promo.
Download or read book Refiner s Fire written by Mark Helprin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Israeli soldier’s life flashes before his eyes in this epic tale: “As if The Odyssey had been updated and rewritten by Dylan Thomas” (The Listener, UK). In 1947, Marshall Pearl is orphaned at birth aboard an immigrant ship off the coast of Palestine. Brought to America, he grows up a child of the Hudson Valley, determined to see the world in all its beauty and ferocity. His epic journey takes him from Jamaica to Harvard; from Great Plains slaughterhouses to the Mexican desert; and from the sea to the Alps. Marshall is eventually drawn to Israel to confront the circumstance of his birth in a crucible of war, magic, suffering, and grace. We first meet Marshall among the mortally wounded Israeli soldiers who are being transferred to Haifa during the Yom Kippur War. From there we follow Marshall—along with his memories and dreams—as he reconstructs his life, galvanizing strength through all that he has learned, suffered, and hoped. “Superb...A first-rate odyssey, full of insight and humor and hard-earned truths”—San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book A Kingdom Far and Clear written by Mark Helprin and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2010-10-20 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a rare collaboration, bestselling authors Helprin and Van Allsburg worked for nearly a decade on this ambitious, multi-generational trilogy that pits the power of love and devotion against dark forces of greed and suppression. For the first time, this hardcover volume collects all three of Helprin's contemporary fantasies —Swan Lake,The Veil of Snows, andA City in Winter— along with Van Allsburg's sensitively wrought illustrations from the original editions. 39 full-color plates.
Download or read book Confluence Narratives written by Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History and Nation-Making in the Americas explores how a collection of contemporary novels calls attention to the impact of ethnicity on national identities in the Americas. These historical narratives portray the cultural encounters—the conflicts and alliances, peaceful borrowings and violent seizures—that have characterized the history of the American continents since the colonial period. In the second half of the twentieth century, North and South American readers have witnessed a steady output of novels that revisit moments of cultural confluence as a means of revising national histories. Confluence Narratives proposes that these historical novels, published in such places as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, make up a key literary genre in the Americas. The genre links the various parts of the hemisphere together through three common historical experiences: colonization, slavery, and immigration. Luciano Tosta demonstrates how numerous texts from the United States, Canada, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil fall into the genre. The book focuses on four case studies from ethnic groups in the Americas: Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Jewish Americans, and Japanese Americans. Tosta uses the experience of the American nations as a springboard to problematize the concept of the contemporary nation, an identity marked by border-crossings and other experiences of deterritorialization. Based on the exploration of “confluence narratives,” Tosta argues that the “contemporary” nation is not as contemporary as one may think. Informed by postcolonial theory and transnational and ethnic studies, this book offers an important comparative study for and of inter-American literature. Its analysis of the representation of cultural encounters within distinctive national histories underscores the complex nature of ‘otherness’ in the Americas, as well as the inherently transcultural aspect of a trans-continental American identity.
Download or read book A Dove of the East written by Mark Helprin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “dazzling collection” of short stories by the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Winter’s Talecontemplates the human experience across the globe (The San Francisco Chronicle & Examiner). In these twenty stories, Mark Helprin offers a series of meditations on some of humanity’s most enduring and universal questions. At the hour of his death, an American priest in Rome must choose between his church and his God. A young man finds love in a hot, dirty typewriter-ribbon factory in the Bronx. A Dutch child in a Canadian orphanage carries the pain of war and her love for her family in her heart. An Israeli scout risks the safety and respect of his comrades in an act of transformative charity. Through beautifully rendered memories and moments of epiphany, “all Helprin's stories deal with essences which lead from the heart…his images are clean and sharp and bright” (Kirkus). “When you read these stories, a you must, you will, I believe, be uplifted and awed.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
Download or read book Rewriting Early America written by Christopher K. Coffman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent poems and fictions set in the early Americas are typically read as affirmations of cultural norms, as evidence of the impossibility of genuine engagement with the historical past, or as contentious repudiations of received histories. Inspired particularly by Mihai Spariosu’s arguments regarding literary playfulness as an opening to peace, Rewriting Early America: The Prenational Past in Postmodern Literature adopts a different perspective, with the goal of demonstrating that many recent literary texts undertake more constructive and hopeful projects with regard to the American past than critics usually recognize. While honoring writers' pervasive critiques of hegemony, this volume trades a preoccupation with antagonism for an interest in restoration and recuperation. It describes how texts by John Barth, John Berryman, Susan Howe, Toni Morrison, Paul Muldoon, Thomas Pynchon, and William T. Vollmann harness the ambiguities of the colonial past to find sociocultural possibilities that operate beyond the workings of power and outside the politics of difference. Throughout, this book remains devoted to uncovering the moments at which contemporary writers proffer visions of American communities defined not by marginalization and oppression, but by responsive understanding and inclusion.
