Download or read book The Katabasis written by Frank Ashby and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Katabasis, a modern day convent-based mystery drama unfolds as a Jesuit priest and a nun enter into a psychological tug-of-war which culminates on the night of the Winter Solstice. Father Bennett realizes his true relation to the Sirian mystery. This discovery proves to be an integral factor in bringing about a baptism of fire through the Hidden God, which they both must endure. As a result of this baptism by fire, Sister Marcia undergoes a radical change in her ontological status from a quiescent nun to a moon goddess under the aegis of the lunar current. Father Bennett then embarks upon a journey which ends with a remarkable revelation about his true destiny in relation to the coming Black Aeon.
Download or read book Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-13 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition explores the theme of visits to the underworld in the ancient Greek and Byzantine traditions from a broad perspective including written sources, iconography and archaeology.
Download or read book Katabasis written by Joseph Brassey and published by 47north. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the death of the fearsome Ogedei Khan, the Mongol invasion of the West has been brought to an abrupt halt. The defenders, a band of brave warrior monks known as the Shield-Brethren, limp homeward again across a frozen, bloodied wasteland. But where--and what--is "home" now that the threat of invasion no longer shapes their lives? Thirteenth-century Europe has been saved from annihilation at the hands of the Mongols, to be sure, but new and terrible threats are at hand: political and religious turmoil threaten to turn the warriors' world upside down once more. Painted against a rich backdrop of medieval mysticism and Russian folklore, Katabasis weaves together the tales of victor and victim alike in a fearless exploration of what it means not just to survive, but to truly live again.
Download or read book The Sign of the Broken Sword written by G. K. Chesterton and published by Complete Father Brown. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver. In a sky of dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless, black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold. Even the square stone tower of the church looked northern to the point of heathenry, as if it were some barbaric tower among the sea rocks of Iceland. It was a queer night for anyone to explore a churchyard. But, on the other hand, perhaps it was worth exploring.
Download or read book Hell in Contemporary Literature written by Falconer Rachel Falconer and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-29 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? Now available in paperback, this book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering - or discovering - selfhood. In exploring these ideas, this book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray, and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and identity; the ethics of the subject; trauma and memory; descent as sexual or political dissent; the interrelation of realism and fantasy; and Occidentalism and Orientalism.Key Features*Defines and discusses what constitutes Hell in contemporary secular Western cultures*Relates ideas from psychoanalysis to literary traditions ranging from Virgil and Dante to the present*Explores the concept of Hell in relation to crises in Western thought and identity. e.g. distortions of global capitalism, mental illness, war trauma and incarceration*Explains the significance of this narrative tradition of a 'descent to hell' in the immediate political context of 9/11 and its aftermath
Download or read book Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World written by Jan N. Bremmer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient Mysteries have long attracted the interest of scholars, an interest that goes back at least to the time of the Reformation. After a period of interest around the turn of the twentieth century, recent decades have seen an important study of Walter Burkert (1987). Yet his thematic approach makes it hard to see how the actual initiation into the Mysteries took place. To do precisely that is the aim of this book. It gives a ‘thick description’ of the major Mysteries, not only of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries, but also those located at the interface of Greece and Anatolia: the Mysteries of Samothrace, Imbros and Lemnos as well as those of the Corybants. It then proceeds to look at the Orphic-Bacchic Mysteries, which have become increasingly better understood due to the many discoveries of new texts in the recent times. Having looked at classical Greece we move on to the Roman Empire, where we study not only the lesser Mysteries, which we know especially from Pausanias, but also the new ones of Isis and Mithras. We conclude our book with a discussion of the possible influence of the Mysteries on emerging Christianity. Its detailed references and up-to-date bibliography will make this book indispensable for any scholar interested in the Mysteries and ancient religion, but also for those scholars who work on initiation or esoteric rituals, which were often inspired by the ancient Mysteries.
Download or read book A Quest for Remembrance written by Madeleine Scherer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern literature brings together a range of arguments exploring connections between the descent into the underworld, also known as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In the process, the volume explores how the hero’s quest into the underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own literary genre, a ‘memorious genre’ related to but distinct from the quest narrative.
Download or read book Passage Through Hell written by David Lawrence Pike and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies. Pike's readings of Louis Ferdinand Céline and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions at work in the modern appropriation of structures derived from ancient and medieval descents. His book shows how these structures were redefined in modernism and persist in contemporary critical practice. In order to recover the historical corpus of modernism, he asserts, it is necessary to acknowledge the attraction that medieval forms and motifs held for modernist literature and theory. By pairing the writings of the postwar German dramatist and novelist Peter Weiss with Dante's Commedia, and Christine de Pizan with Virginia Woolf, Pike argues for a new level of complexity in the relation between medieval and modern poetics. Pike's supple and persuasive reading of the Commedia resituates that text within the contradictions of medieval tradition. He contends that the Dantean allegory of conversion, altered to suit the exigencies of modernism, maintains its hold over current literature and theory. The postwar writers Pike treats--Weiss, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott--exemplify alternate strategies for negotiating the legacy of modernism. The passage through hell emerges as a way of disentangling images of the past from their interpretation in the present.
Download or read book Piracy Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity written by Richard Evans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Piracy, Pillage, and Plunder in Antiquity explores appropriation in its broadest terns in the ancient world, from brigands, mercenaries and state-sponsored "piracy", to literary appropriation and the modern plundering of antiquities. The chronological extent of the studies in this volume, written by an international group of experts, ranges from about 2000 BCE to the 20th century. The geographical spectrum in similarly diverse, encompassing Africa, the Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia, allowing readers to track this phenomenon in various different manifestations. Predatory behaviour is a phenomenon seen in all walks of life. While violence may often be concomitant it is worth observing that predation can be extremely nuanced in its application, and it is precisely this gradation and its focus that occupies the essential issue in this volume. Piracy, Pillage, and Plunder in Antiquity will be of great interest to those studying a range of topics in antiquity, including literature and art, cities and their foundations, crime, warfare, and geography.
Download or read book Faulkner s Reception of Apuleius The Golden Ass in The Reivers written by Vernon L. Provencal and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faulkner's final novel, The Reivers, has been gently dismissed by scholars and critics as no more than its subtitle claims, A Reminiscence. Although the new millennium has seen a new appreciation for Faulkner's later novels, The Reivers is still perceived as a slightly fictionalized comic memoir romanticizing the early life of the author in the pre-civil rights American South. This volume takes this dismissal of The Reivers to task for failing to appreciate its employment of the Apuleian narrative of life-altering metamorphosis to offer, as his literary farewell, hope for humanity's self-redemption. Vernon L. Provencal studies the reception of The Golden Ass in The Reivers as comic novels of moral katabasis (wilful descent into the lawless underworld) and providential anabasis (societal and spiritual redemption). As the independent basis of the reception study, The Reivers receives its first ever detailed reading, while The Golden Ass is read anew from the teleological perspective offered by the (undervalued) prophecy that in the end the comic hero would become the book itself.
Download or read book Ritual and Religion in Flavian Epic written by Antony Augoustakis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection addresses the role of ritual representations and religion in the epic poems of the Flavian period. Drawing on various studies on religion and ritual and the relationship between literature and religion in the Greco-Roman world, it explores the poets' use of the relationship between gods and humans and religious activities.
Download or read book Structures of Epic Poetry written by Christiane Reitz and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 2756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compendium (4 vols.) studies the continuity, flexibility, and variation of structural elements in epic narratives. It provides an overview of the structural patterns of epic poetry by means of a standardized, stringent terminology. Both diachronic developments and changes within individual epics are scrutinized in order to provide a comprehensive structural approach and a key to intra- and intertextual characteristics of ancient epic poetry.
Download or read book How the West Was Won written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains articles on various aspects of literary imagination, with essays ranging from Petrarch to Voltaire, on the canon, with essays on western history as one of shifting cultural ideals, and on the Christian Middle Ages. The volume is a Festschrift for Burcht Pranger of the University of Amsterdam.
Download or read book Mortal and Divine in Early Greek Epistemology written by Shaul Tor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-12 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book rethinks the relations between reasoning and revelation and, therefore, the nature of philosophy and religion in archaic Greece.
Download or read book Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty First Century written by Fiona Macintosh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greek and Roman epic poetry has always provided creative artists in the modern world with a rich storehouse of themes. Tim Supple and Simon Reade's 1999 stage adaptation of Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid for the RSC heralded a new lease of life for receptions of the genre, and it now routinely provides raw material for the performance repertoire of both major cultural institutions and emergent, experimental theatre companies. This volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, with chapters covering not only a significant chronological span, but also ranging widely across both place and genre, analysing lyric, film, dance, and opera from Europe to Asia and the Americas. What emerges most clearly is how anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world, together with the ancient precedent of Greek tragedy's reworking of epic material, explain its migration to the theatre. This move, though, was not without problems, as epic encountered the barriers imposed by neo-classicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded its broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally has rendered reinvention not only legitimate, but also deeply appropriate, opening up a range of forms and traditions within which epic themes and structures may be explored. Drawing on the expertise of specialists from the fields of classical studies, English and comparative literature, modern languages, music, dance, and theatre and performance studies, as well as from practitioners within the creative industries, the volume is able to offer an unprecedented modern and dynamic study of 'epic' content and form across myriad diverse performance arenas.
Download or read book Memories of the Classical Underworld in Irish and Caribbean Literature written by Madeleine Scherer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.
Download or read book University Library of Autobiography written by and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
