Download or read book Empire of Enchantment written by John Zubrzycki and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become a popular amusement for the masses around the globe"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Empire of Enchantment written by John Zubrzycki and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India's association with magicians goes back thousands of years. Conjurors and illusionists dazzled the courts of Hindu maharajas and Mughal emperors. As British dominion spread over the subcontinent, such wonder-workers became synonymous with India. Western magicians appropriated Indian attire, tricks and stage names; switching their turbans for top hats, Indian jugglers fought back and earned their grudging respect. This book tells the extraordinary story of how Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become part of daily ritual and popular entertainment across the globe. Recounting tales of levitating Brahmins, resurrections, prophesying monkeys and "the most famous trick never performed," Empire of Enchantment vividly charts Indian magic's epic journey from street to the stage. This heavily illustrated book tells the extraordinary, untold story of how Indian magic descended from the realm of the gods to become part of daily ritual and popular entertainment across the globe. Drawing on ancient religious texts, early travelers' accounts, colonial records, modern visual sources, and magicians' own testimony, Empire of Enchantment is a vibrant narrative of India's magical traditions, from Vedic times to the present day.
Download or read book Realism s Empire written by Geoffrey Baker and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If realist novels are the literary avatars of secular science and rational progress, then why are so many canonical realist works organized around a fear of that progress? Realism is openly indebted, at the level of form and content, to imperialist and scientific advances. However, critical emphasis on this has obscured the extent to which major novelists of the period openly worried about the fate of mystery and the dissolution of tradition that accompanied science's shrinking of the world. Realism's modernization is inseparable from nostalgia. In Realism's Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that realist fiction's stance toward both progress and the foreign or supernatural is much more complex than established scholarship has assumed. The work of Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane explicitly laments the loss of mystery in the world due to increased knowledge and exploration. To counter this loss and to generate the complications required for narrative, these three authors import peripheral, usually colonial figures into the metropolitan centers they otherwise depict as disenchanted and rationalized: Paris, London, and Berlin. Baker's book examines the consequences of this duel for realist narrative and readers' understandings of its historical moment. In so doing, Baker shows Balzac, Trollope, and Fontane grappling with new realities that frustrate their inherited means of representation and oversee a significant shift in the development of the novel.
Download or read book Enchantment written by Jean Starobinski and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines some figures of seduction as they have appeared over the course of opera's history." --introd.
Download or read book Enchantments written by Kathryn Harrison and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK “Part love story, part history, this novel is a tour de force [told] in language that soars and sears.”—More St. Petersburg, 1917. After Rasputin’s body is pulled from the icy waters of the Neva River, his eighteen-year-old daughter, Masha, is sent to live at the imperial palace with Tsar Nikolay and his family. Desperately hoping that Masha has inherited Rasputin’s healing powers, Tsarina Alexandra asks her to tend to her son, the headstrong prince Alyosha, who suffers from hemophilia. Soon after Masha arrives at the palace, the tsar is forced to abdicate, and the Bolsheviks place the royal family under house arrest. As Russia descends into civil war, Masha and Alyosha find solace in each other’s company. To escape the confinement of the palace, and to distract the prince from the pain she cannot heal, Masha tells him stories—some embellished and others entirely imagined—about Nikolay and Alexandra’s courtship, Rasputin’s exploits, and their wild and wonderful country, now on the brink of an irrevocable transformation. In the worlds of their imagination, the weak become strong, legend becomes fact, and a future that will never come to pass feels close at hand. Praise for Enchantments “A sumptuous, atmospheric account of the last days of the Romanovs from the perspective of Rasputin’s daughter, [told] with the sensuous, transporting prose that is Kathryn Harrison’s trademark.”—Jennifer Egan “[A] splendid and surprising book . . . Harrison has given us something enduring.”—The New York Times Book Review “[Harrison delivers] this oft-told moment with shocking freshness. . . . Masha re-invents our ideas of Rasputin, and the world of Nicholas and Alexandra is imbued with a glow whose fierceness is governed by the imminence of its loss.”—Los Angeles Times “A mesmerizing novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Bewitching . . . Harrison sets historic facts like jewels in this intricately fashioned work of exalted empathy and imagination, a literary Fabergé egg. . . . [A] dazzling return to historical fiction.”—Booklist (starred review) Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.
Download or read book Hidden Empire written by Orson Scott Card and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2010-12-28 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stand-alone sequel to Card's "New York Times"-bestselling novel "Empire" continues the author's message about the dangers of extreme political polarization and the need to reassert moderation and mutual citizenship ("Booklist").
Download or read book Magic Lantern Empire written by John Phillip Short and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic Lantern Empire examines German colonialism as a mass cultural and political phenomenon unfolding at the center of a nascent, conflicted German modernity. John Phillip Short draws together strands of propaganda and visual culture, science and fantasy to show how colonialism developed as a contested form of knowledge that both reproduced and blurred class difference in Germany, initiating the masses into a modern market worldview. A nuanced account of how ordinary Germans understood and articulated the idea of empire, this book draws on a diverse range of sources: police files, spy reports, pulp novels, popular science writing, daily newspapers, and both official and private archives. In Short’s historical narrative—peopled by fantasists and fabulists, by impresarios and amateur photographers, by ex-soldiers and rank-and-file socialists, by the luckless and bored along the margins of German society—colonialism emerges in metropolitan Germany through a dialectic of science and enchantment within the context of sharp class conflict. He begins with the organized colonial movement, with its expert scientific and associational structures and emphatic exclusion of the "masses." He then turns to the grassroots colonialism that thrived among the lower classes, who experienced empire through dime novels, wax museums, and panoramas. Finally, he examines the ambivalent posture of Germany’s socialists, who mounted a trenchant critique of colonialism, while in their reading rooms workers spun imperial fantasies. It was from these conflicts, Short argues, that there first emerged in the early twentieth century a modern German sense of the global.
Download or read book The Mysterious Mr Jacob written by John Zubrzycki and published by Transit Lounge . This book was released on 2017-04-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a scandal that rocked the highest echelons of the British Raj. In 1891, a notorious jeweller and curio dealer from Simla offered to sell the world's largest brilliant-cut diamond to the fabulously wealthy Nizam of Hyderabad. If the audacious deal succeeded it would set the merchant up for life. But the transaction went horribly wrong. The Nizam accused him of fraud, triggering a sensational trial in the Calcutta High Court that made headlines around the world...
Download or read book The Age of Magic written by Ben Okri and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this enchanting novel from the Booker Prize–winning author, a group of world-weary travelers discover the meaning of life in a mysterious Swiss mountain village. The Age of Magic has begun. Unveil your eyes. Eight weary filmmakers, traveling from Paris to Basel, arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain. Over the course of three days and two nights, the travelers will find themselves drawn into the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, they will be disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way. An intoxicating and dreamlike tale unfolds. Allow yourself to be transformed. Having shown a different way of seeing the world, Ben Okri now offers a different way of reading.
Download or read book Enchantment and Creed in the Hymns of Ambrose of Milan written by Brian P. Dunkle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enchantment and Creed in the Hymns of Ambrose of Milan offers the first critical overview of the hymns of Ambrose of Milan in the context of fourth-century doctrinal song and Ambrose's own catechetical preaching. Brian P. Dunkle, SJ, argues that these settings inform the interpretation of Ambrose's hymnodic project. The hymns employ sophisticated poetic techniques to foster a pro-Nicene sensitivity in the bishop's embattled congregation. After a summary presentation of early Christian hymnody, with special attention to Ambrose's Latin predecessors, Dunkle describes the mystagogical function of fourth-century songs. He examines Ambrose's sermons, especially his catechetical and mystagogical works, for preached parallels to this hymnodic effort. Close reading of Ambrose's hymnodic corpus constitutes the bulk of the study. Dunkle corroborates his findings through a treatment of early Ambrosian imitations, especially the poetry of Prudentius. These early readers amplify the hymnodic features that Dunkle identifies as "enchanting," that is, enlightening the "eyes of faith."
Download or read book Buddhist Magic written by Sam van Schaik and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the role that magic has played in the history of Buddhism As far back as we can see in the historical record, Buddhist monks and nuns have offered services including healing, divination, rain making, aggressive magic, and love magic to local clients. Studying this history, scholar Sam van Schaik concludes that magic and healing have played a key role in Buddhism's flourishing, yet they have rarely been studied in academic circles or by Western practitioners. The exclusion of magical practices and powers from most discussions of Buddhism in the modern era can be seen as part of the appropriation of Buddhism by Westerners, as well as an effect of modernization movements within Asian Buddhism. However, if we are to understand the way Buddhism has worked in the past, the way it still works now in many societies, and the way it can work in the future, we need to examine these overlooked aspects of Buddhist practice. In Buddhist Magic, van Schaik takes a book of spells and rituals--one of the earliest that has survived--from the Silk Road site of Dunhuang as the key reference point for discussing Buddhist magic in Tibet and beyond. After situating Buddhist magic within a cross-cultural history of world magic, he discusses sources of magic in Buddhist scripture, early Buddhist rituals of protection, medicine and the spread of Buddhism, and magic users. Including material from across the vast array of Buddhist traditions, van Schaik offers readers a fascinating, nuanced view of a topic that has too long been ignored.
Download or read book Art and Vision in the Inca Empire written by Adam Herring and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-22 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new, art-historical interpretation of pre-contact Inca culture and power and includes over sixty color images.
Download or read book The Enchantments of Mammon written by Eugene McCarraher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century
Download or read book Conjuring Asia written by Chris Goto-Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the history of modern magic across India, China and Japan, analyzing representations in the cultural imagination of the West.
Download or read book The Enchantress of Florence written by Salman Rushdie and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar’s grandfather Babar: Qara Köz, ‘Lady Black Eyes’, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbeg warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerised by her presence, and much trouble ensues. The Enchantress of Florence is a love story and a mystery – the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other – the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia’s boyhood friend ‘il Machia’ – Niccolò Machiavelli – is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor’s story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he’s a liar, must he die?
Download or read book Enchantment written by Orson Scott Card and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2005-05-31 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Enchantment, Orson Scott Card works his magic as never before, transforming the timeless story of Sleeping Beauty into an original fantasy brimming with romance and adventure. The moment Ivan stumbled upon a clearing in the dense Carpathian forest, his life was forever changed. Atop a pedestal encircled by fallen leaves, the beautiful princess Katerina lay still as death. But beneath the foliage a malevolent presence stirred and sent the ten-year-old Ivan scrambling for the safety of Cousin Marek's farm. Now, years later, Ivan is an American graduate student, engaged to be married. Yet he cannot forget that long-ago day in the forest—or convince himself it was merely a frightened boy’s fantasy. Compelled to return to his native land, Ivan finds the clearing just as he left it. This time he does not run. This time he awakens the beauty with a kiss . . . and steps into a world that vanished a thousand years ago. A rich tapestry of clashing worlds and cultures, Enchantment is a powerfully original novel of a love and destiny that transcend centuries . . . and the dark force that stalks them across the ages.
Download or read book Land of Nuclear Enchantment written by Lucie Genay and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thoughtful social history of New Mexico’s nuclear industry, Lucie Genay traces the scientific colonization of the state in the twentieth century from the points of view of the local people. Genay focuses on personal experiences in order to give a sense of the upheaval that accompanied the rise of the nuclear era. She gives voice to the Hispanics and Native Americans of the Jémez Plateau, the blue-collar workers of Los Alamos, the miners and residents of the Grants Uranium Belt, and the ranchers and farmers who were affected by the federal appropriation of land in White Sands Missile Range and whose lives were upended by the Trinity test and the US government’s reluctance to address the “collateral damage” of the work at the Range. Genay reveals the far-reaching implications for the residents as New Mexico acquired a new identity from its embrace of nuclear science.
