Author: Ronald R. Thomas
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801496943
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Author: Isabel Moreira
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801436611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Drawing on a rich variety of sources - histories, hagiographies, ascetic literature, and records of dreams at saints' shrines - Isabel Moreira provides insight into a society struggling to understand and negotiate its religious visions."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Isabel Moreira
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801474671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
In early medieval Europe, dreams and visions were believed to reveal divine information about Christian life and the hereafter. No consensus existed, however, as to whether all Christians, or only a spiritual elite, were entitled to have a relationship of this sort with the supernatural. Drawing on a rich variety of sources—histories, hagiographies, ascetic literature, and records of dreams at saints' shrines—Isabel Moreira provides insight into a society struggling to understand and negotiate its religious visions. Moreira analyzes changing attitudes toward dreams and visionary experiences beginning in late antiquity, when the church hierarchy considered lay dreamers a threat to its claims of spiritual authority. Moreira describes how, over the course of the Merovingian period, the clergy came to accept the visions of ordinary folk—peasants, women, and children—as authentic. Dream literature and accounts of visionary experiences infiltrated all aspects of medieval culture by the eighth century, and the dreams of ordinary Christians became central to the clergy's pastoral concerns. Written in clear and inviting prose, this book enables readers to understand how the clerics of Merovingian Gaul allowed a Christian culture of dreaming to develop and flourish without compromising the religious orthodoxy of the community or the primacy of their own authority.

Author: Maria Piantanida
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820474540
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Textbook

Author: Mimi Hanaoka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316785246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text's creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre-periphery relations.

Author: Bruce Lincoln
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022668251X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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What is authority? How is it constituted? How ought one understand the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) relations between authority and coercion? Between authorized and subversive speech? In this fascinating and intricate analysis, Bruce Lincoln argues that authority is not an entity but an effect. More precisely, it is an effect that depends for its power on the combination of the right speaker, the right speech, the right staging and props, the right time and place, and an audience historically and culturally conditioned to judge what is right in all these instances and to respond with trust, respect, and even reverence. Employing a vast array of examples drawn from classical antiquity, Scandinavian law, Cold War scholarship, and American presidential politics, Lincoln offers a telling analysis of the performance of authority, and subversions of it, from ancient times to the present. Using a small set of case studies that highlight critical moments in the construction of authority, he goes on to offer a general examination of "corrosive" discourses such as gossip, rumor, and curses; the problematic situation of women, who often are barred from the authorizing sphere; the role of religion in the construction of authority; the question of whether authority in the modern and postmodern world differs from its premodern counterpart; and a critique of Hannah Arendt's claims that authority has disappeared from political life in the modern world. He does not find a diminution of authority or a fundamental change in the conditions that produce it. Rather, Lincoln finds modern authority splintered, expanded, and, in fact, multiplied as the mechanisms for its construction become more complex—and more expensive.

Author: Joseph Anthony Rulli
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467151432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Author: Joseph Hill
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487522444
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Since around 2000, a growing number of women in Dakar, Senegal have come to act openly as spiritual leaders for both men and women. As urban youth turn to the Fay?a Tij?niyya Sufi Islamic movement in search of direction and community, these women provide guidance in practicing Islam and cultivating mystical knowledge of God. While women Islamic leaders may appear radical in a context where women have rarely exercised Islamic authority, they have provoked surprisingly little controversy. Wrapping Authority tells these women's stories and explores how they have developed ways of leading that feel natural to themselves and those around them. Addressing the dominant perceptions of Islam as a conservative practise, with stringent regulations for women in particular, Joseph Hill reveals how women integrate values typically associated with pious Muslim women into their leadership. These female leaders present spiritual guidance as a form of nurturing motherhood; they turn acts of devotional cooking into a basis of religious authority and prestige; they connect shyness, concealing clothing, and other forms of feminine "self-wrapping" to exemplary piety, hidden knowledge, and charismatic mystique. Yet like Sufi mystical discourse, their self-presentations are profoundly ambiguous, insisting simultaneously on gender distinctions and on the transcendence of gender through mystical unity with God.

Author: Patrick Parrinder
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1349214795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The second edition of this lively and trenchant one-volume history of literary criticism in English includes new assessments of the work of T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, the American New Critics, Northrop Frye, Roman Jakobson, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Virginia Woolf and others. Authors and Authority traces the connections between critical debate and the changing forms of literary culture from the Neoclassical period to the latest manifestations of literary theory, feminist criticism and cultural studies. From reviews of the first edition: 'A most important study.' - British Book News 'Valuable and suggestive.' - Poetry Nation Review 'Consistently balanced, judicious and acute - massively erudite without ever being overpowering.' - M.Fagg, Times Educational Supplement

Author: Linda E. Chown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000639061
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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This study, originally published in 1990, assesses a shift in the presentation of self-consciousness in two pairs of novels by Doris Lessing and Carmen Martín Gaite: 1) Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and Martín Gaite’s Retahílas (1974) and 2) Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Martín Gaite’s The Back Room (1978). Three major structural divisions facilitate examining implications of the novels for 1) feminism 2) literary narrative and 3) the lives of people-at-large.