Allegories of Desire

Allegories of Desire PDF Author: Susan Blakely Klein
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170389
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
One of the more intriguing developments within medieval Japanese literature is the incorporation into the teaching of waka poetry of the practices of initiation ceremonies and secret transmissions found in esoteric Buddhism. The main figure in this development was the obscure thirteenth-century poet Fujiwara Tameaki, grandson of the famous poet Fujiwara Teika and a priest in a tantric Buddhist sect. Tameaki’s commentaries and teachings transformed secular texts such as the Tales of Ise and poetry anthologies such as the Kokin waka shu into complex allegories of Buddhist enlightenment. These commentaries were transmitted to his students during elaborate initiation ceremonies. In later periods, Tameaki’s specific ideas fell out of vogue, but the habit of interpreting poetry allegorically continued. This book examines the contents of these commentaries as well as the qualities of the texts they addressed that lent themselves to an allegorical interpretation; the political, economic, and religious developments of the Kamakura period that encouraged the development of this method of interpretation; and the possible motives of the participants in this school of interpretation. Through analyses of six esoteric commentaries, Susan Blakeley Klein presents examples of this interpretive method and discusses its influence on subsequent texts, both elite and popular.

Allegories of Desire

Allegories of Desire PDF Author: Susan Blakely Klein
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170389
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
One of the more intriguing developments within medieval Japanese literature is the incorporation into the teaching of waka poetry of the practices of initiation ceremonies and secret transmissions found in esoteric Buddhism. The main figure in this development was the obscure thirteenth-century poet Fujiwara Tameaki, grandson of the famous poet Fujiwara Teika and a priest in a tantric Buddhist sect. Tameaki’s commentaries and teachings transformed secular texts such as the Tales of Ise and poetry anthologies such as the Kokin waka shu into complex allegories of Buddhist enlightenment. These commentaries were transmitted to his students during elaborate initiation ceremonies. In later periods, Tameaki’s specific ideas fell out of vogue, but the habit of interpreting poetry allegorically continued. This book examines the contents of these commentaries as well as the qualities of the texts they addressed that lent themselves to an allegorical interpretation; the political, economic, and religious developments of the Kamakura period that encouraged the development of this method of interpretation; and the possible motives of the participants in this school of interpretation. Through analyses of six esoteric commentaries, Susan Blakeley Klein presents examples of this interpretive method and discusses its influence on subsequent texts, both elite and popular.

Domestic Allegories of Political Desire

Domestic Allegories of Political Desire PDF Author: Claudia Tate
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019536080X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the center of Tate's examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history--a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history." Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot encodes a resonant cultural narrative--a domestic allegory--about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African-Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.

Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek

Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek PDF Author: David Greven
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078645458X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Studying the Star Trek myth from the original 1960s series to the 2009 franchise-reboot film, this book challenges frequent accusations that the Star Trek saga refuses to represent queer sexuality. Arguing that Star Trek speaks to queer audiences through subtle yet provocative allegorical narratives, the analysis pays close attention to representations of gender, race, and sexuality to develop an understanding of the franchise's queer sensibility. Topics include the 1960s original's deconstruction of the male gaze and the traditional assumptions of male visual mastery; constructions of femininity in Star Trek: Voyager, particularly in the relationship between Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine; and the ways in which Star Trek: Enterprise's adoption of neoconservative politics may have led to its commercial and aesthetic failure.

Allegories of Desire

Allegories of Desire PDF Author: M. M. Adjarian
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book explores the relationship between famous and fictional Caribbean female bodies to literary and historical writing. Through her concentration on the perspectives of women writers, her scrupulous attention to the specific histories of the different islands, her interest in diasporic as well as local writing, her embrace of texts in English, French, and Spanish, her insightful exploration of the poetics of allegory, Maude Adjarian invites us to undertake a fundamental rethinking of the concept of national allegory. This criticism is serious and substantial, scholarly and responsible, but also shrewd, engaging and very refreshing.Ross Chambers, Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, The University of Michigan Caribbean writers and literary-cultural theorists have traditionally associated the Caribbean archipelago and Caribbeanness with the female body. In so doing, however, they have erased not only the bodies but the social, historical and national experiences of real Caribbean women. Allegories of Desire explores the relationship between famous and fictional Caribbean female bodies to literary and historical writing. By looking at the works of six post-1980 Caribbean women writer—Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, J. J. Dominique, Julia Alvarez and Rosario Ferre—M. M. Adjarian uncovers patterns of female bodily resistance to subordination and oppression. These patterns in turn identify the Caribbean and Caribbeanness with ungendered longings for freedom from the imperial twins of patriarchy and North Atlantic colonialism rather than with an imagined, and ultimately exploited, feminine. This compelling study will shed new light on Caribbean literature.

Allegories of Desire

Allegories of Desire PDF Author: Susan Blakeley Klein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Allegory
Languages : en
Pages : 1136

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Book Description


Allegories of Desire

Allegories of Desire PDF Author: M. M. Adjarian
Publisher: Praeger Publishers
ISBN: 9780313039287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Explores the literary works of six Caribbean women writers from a broad range of social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.

Allegories of Telling

Allegories of Telling PDF Author: Lynn Wells
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004487662
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Allegories of Telling: Self-Referential Narrative in Contemporary British Fiction has as its founding premise Ross Chambers’s notion that “one of the important powers of fiction is its power to theorize the act of storytelling in and through the act of storytelling.” In this critical study, Lynn Wells presents detailed readings of novels by five prominent British authors – John Fowles, Angela Carter, Graham Swift, A.S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie – with an emphasis on how the texts' self-referential aspects illuminate the acts of reading and writing fiction in contemporary Britain and, by extension, around the world. The book begins by situating contemporary British fiction historically as the product of an “aesthetics of compromise” arising from the “realism versus experimentalism” debate that consumed the English literary establishment during the 1960s. In her discussion of the texts, Lynn Wells then draws on a wide range of theoretical approaches, from narrative and psychoanalytic theory to existentialist philosophy and the historiographic ideas of thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Giambattista Vico. These original readings challenge superficial “postmodern” interpretations of contemporary British fiction as pessimistically anti-historical, and reassert the value of readerly engagement and narrative reconstruction of the past.

Allegories of the Iliad

Allegories of the Iliad PDF Author: John Tzetzes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780674967854
Category : Allegories
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
As a didactic explanation of pagan ancient Greek culture to Orthodox Christians, John Tzetzes's Allegories of the Iliad is deeply rooted in the mid-twelfth-century circumstances of the cosmopolitan Comnenian court. As a critical reworking of the Iliad, it is part of the millennia-long global tradition of Homeric adaptation.

Allegories of the Anthropocene

Allegories of the Anthropocene PDF Author: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478005580
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.

Allegories of One's Own Mind

Allegories of One's Own Mind PDF Author: David G. Riede
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210082
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Perhaps because major Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold proscribed Romantic melancholy as morbidly diseased and unsuitable for poetic expression, critics have neglected or understated the central importance of melancholy in Victorian poetry. Allegories of One's Own Mind re-directs our attention to a mode that Arnold was rejecting as morbid but also acknowledging when he disparaged the widely current idea that the highest ambition of poetry should be to present an allegory of the poet's own mind. This book shows how early Victorian poets suffered from and railed against what they perceived to be a "disabling post-Wordsworthian melancholy"-we might refer to it as depression-and yet benefited from this self-absorbed or love-obsessed state, which ironically made them more productive. David G. Riede argues that the dominant thematic and formal concerns of the age, in fact, are embodied in the ambivalence of Carlyle, Arnold, and others, who pitted a Victorian ideology of duty, rationality, and high moral character against a still compelling Romantic cultivation of the deep self intuited as melancholy. Such ambivalence, in fact, is in itself constitutive of melancholy, long understood as the product of conscience raging against inchoate desire, and it constitutes the mood of the age's most important poetry, represented here in the major works of Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even in the notoriously "optimistic" Robert Browning. David G. Riede is professor of English at The Ohio State University.