Author: David Mason
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
ISBN: 1589881729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
"Witty and heartfelt essays, shaken and stirred."—Kirkus Reviews "David Mason believes in literature as a weather event—even an extreme one. He reads to be changed—drenched, burned, blown away. He has no wish to have his standing position confirmed, and is alert to the ways in which his subjects are changed, both by their writing and its reception. These essays move comfortably from the lines of a Nobel Prize-winning poet to the dwelling of a Greek peasant who could have stepped out of Homer, on to the perils of literary biography. Mason is a reader as much as he is a writer. He looks into the political in order to find the personal—not the other way round. Incarnation & Metamorphosis is engaging all the way through, not least when Mason acts on the assumption, 'The imagination is free.'”—James Campbell, author of Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin “Literary criticism,” David Mason writes, “ought to entertain as well as illuminate.” In these essays Mason tells stories about embodiment and change, incarnation and metamorphosis, drawing connections between art and life without confusing the two. Mason considers the many kinds of change we encounter in our lives, our desire for justice, and the ways great writers complicate that desire. He discusses the lives and works of writers like Montaigne, Diderot, and Neruda as well as his colorful father’s fascination with a fictional character. He takes up such contemporary figures as the daring Australian writer Helen Garner, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the poet-critic Dana Gioia; has fresh things to say about the perils of fame in the careers of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney; and mourns the loss of poet Michael Donaghy. Incarnation & Metamorphosis is a book about living with literature—Mason writes that literature “is telling us that we are seen, warts and all. Criticism, such as the essays in this book, is a way of seeing back.”
Author: Kevin Hart
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
ISBN: 1589881893
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
"Put this beautiful book on your shelf between Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life."—William Giraldi, author of The Hero's Body This powerful memoir from poet Kevin Hart traces his difficult childhood as a "backward boy" in a poor part of London, a disorienting move to tropical Australia, and the secrets he and his family kept from one another. Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood is Kevin Hart’s searing, yet at times hilarious, narrative of his first thirteen years. It is a story of survival and transformation, of deception and recovery, and it passes from a frightening childhood in the East-End of London to a new and bewildering life in sub-tropical Australia. Throughout, Hart draws on John Bunyan’s evocation of “Dark-Land” in Pilgrim’s Progress, the place Valiant-for-Truth leaves in order to seek the Celestial City. But Dark-Land is no allegory. We see Hart’s hidden inner life, his family’s penchant for keeping secrets, and their illusions about the nature of their shared past. We see Hart grow from being the despair of his teachers in a rough primary school to experiencing a “conversion” in a math class in Brisbane, Australia, which turned him into a Christian, a poet, and an academic. Written in elegant, lucid prose, without a trace of sentimentality, Dark-Land is a memoir of a working-class childhood, a narrative of a migrant, and the story of a convert to Christianity.
Author: Thomas H. Ford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000401235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
How to Read a Poem is an introduction to creative reading, the art of coming up with something to say about a text. It presents a new method for learning and teaching the skills of poetic interpretation, providing its readers with practical steps they can use to construct perceptive, inventive readings of any poem they might read. The Introduction sets out the aims of the book and provides some basic operating principles for applying the seven steps. In each subsequent chapter, the step is introduced and explained, relevant points of interpretative theory and methodology are discussed and illustrated with multiple examples, and the step is put into practice in a final section. Through these final sections, step by step, the book develops an extended reading of a single poem, Letitia Landon’s "Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love-Letter" from 1822. That reading is sustained across the whole arc of the book, providing a detailed worked example of how to read a poem. This accessible and enjoyable guide is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching the detailed study of poetry for the first time and offers valuable theoretical insights for those more experienced in the area.
Author: Warren Jefferson
Publisher: Native Voices Books
ISBN: 1570679843
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Here is an in-depth look at spiritual experiences about which very little has been written. Belief in reincarnation exists not only in India but in most small tribal societies throughout the world, including many Indian groups in North America. The reader is offered a rich tapestry of stories from a number of North American tribes about death, dying, and returning to this life. Included are stories from the Inuit of the polar regions; the Northwest Coast people, such as the Kwakiutl, the Gitxsan, the Tlingit, and the Suquamish; the Hopi and the Cochiti of the Southwest; the Winnebago of the Great Lakes region; the Cherokee of the Southeast,; and the Sioux people of the Plains area. Readers will learn about a Winnebago shaman's initiation, the Cherokee's Orpheus myth, the Hopi story of A Journey to the Skeleton House, the Inuit man who lived the lives of all animals, the Ghost Dance, and other extraordinary accounts. The ethnological record indicates reincarnation beliefs are found among the indigenous peoples on all continents of this earth as well as in most of the world's major religions. This book makes a valuable contribution towards having a deeper understanding of North American Indian spiritual beliefs.
Author: Wynn Free
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1556439768
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
Discover the legacy of the most famous psychic of the 20th-century in this stirring exploration of psychic abilities, reincarnation, and other paranormal phenomena There are remarkable parallels between the work of David Wilcock and Edgar Cayce—the legendary clairvoyant, ‘sleeping prophet’, and ‘father of holistic medicine’. Here, author Wynn Free explores these parallels, building a convincing case that the two men shared the same source of prophetic information—and that Wilcock might indeed be Cayce’s reincarnation. Compiling some of Wilcock’s most inspirational and life-transforming prophetic guidance from his channeled Source, this book conveys profound insights into topics such as earth changes, secret cabals, soul evolution, death and reincarnation, ascension, crop circles, and the theory of evolution. Explaining how energetic increases occurring in the Sun and planets can have scientifically-measurable, far-reaching effects in a number of realms, The Reincarnation of Edgar Cayce presents new evidence that this energy can transform DNA, potentially making ESP, telekinesis, levitation, and other paranormal activities as common as breathing and usher in the Golden Age promised by every major spiritual tradition in human history. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding not only of the life and work of both Wilcock and Cayce, but with a broader sense of the many forces—seen and unseen—at work in the universe today.
Author: Ingo Gildenhard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351538713
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 688
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Book Description
This groundbreaking volume maps the shifting place and function of marvelous transformations from antiquity to the present day. Shape-shifting, taking animal bodies, miracles, transubstantiation, alchemy, and mutation recur and echo throughout ancient and modern writing and thinking and continue in science fiction today as tales of gene-splicing and hybridisation. The idea of metamorphosis lies in uneasy coexistence with orderly world views and it is often cast out, or attributed to enemies. Augustine and the church fathers consider shape-shifting ungodly; Enlightenment thinkers suppress alchemy as unscientific; genetically-modified wheat and stem-cell research are stigmatised as unnatural. Yet the very possibility of radical transformation inspires hope just as it frightens. A provocative, theorising, trans-historical history, this book ranges across classics, literature, history, philosophy, theology and anthropology. From Homer and Ovid to Proust and H. P. Lovecraft and through figures from Proteus to Kafka's Fly and toSpiderman, four historical surveys are combined with nine case studies to show the malleable, yet persistent, presence of transformation throughout Western cultural history.
Author: Prudence J. Jones
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739112403
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
Reading Rivers is the first book in a new series: Roman Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Author Prudence Jones examines rivers as a literary phenomenon, particularly in the poetry of Vergil. The point of such an investigation is twofold: an examination of VergilOs poetry elucidates particularly clearly a point about rivers: that their inclusion functions almost as a literary device, and an examination of rivers makes a point about Vergil: that rivers are essential to understanding the trajectory of his works, in particular the structure of the Aeneid. This study depends primarily on the close analysis of the poetry of Vergil and of other relevant authors. In Part I Jones examines the Greco-Roman understanding of the river in its primary symbolic roles: cosmological, ritual and ethnographical. Part II analyzes the river as a literary device, with particular attention to the works of Vergil, and argues that descriptions of rivers in Roman poetry are, in many cases, a form of authorial comment on the progress or structure of a narrative. Jones gives scholars in the classics, and literary critics who focus specifically on Roman antiquity a special prism through which to view the works of Vergil as well as other significant authors. This book is also for those working in the fields of cultural studies, cultural geography, and ancient philosophy.
Author: Martin M. Winkler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108485405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491
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Book Description
The first study of Ovid, especially his Metamorphoses, as inherently visual literature, explaining his pervasive importance in our visual media.
Author: Canadian Anthropology Society. Meeting
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802077035
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
Until now few people have been aware of the prevalence of belief in some form of rebirth or reincarnation among North American native peoples. This collection of essays by anthropologists and one psychiatrist examines this concept among native American societies, from near the time of contact until the present day. Amerindian Rebirth opens with a foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere that contrasts North American and Hindu/Buddhist/Jain beliefs. The introduction gives an overview, and the first chapter summarizes the context, distribution, and variety of recorded belief. All the papers chronicle some aspect of rebirth belief in a number of different cultures. Essays cover such topics as seventeenth-century Huron eschatology, Winnebago ideology, varying forms of Inuit belief, and concepts of rebirth found among subarctic natives and Northwest Coast peoples. The closing chapters address the genesis and anthropological study of Amerindian reincarnation. In addition, the possibility of evidence for the actuality of rebirth is addressed. Amerindian Rebirth will further our understanding of concepts of self-identity, kinship, religion, cosmology, resiliency, and change among native North American peoples
Author: Stephen J. Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199258627
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
A pioneering study of ancient and medieval Christology. Employing a range of interdisciplinary methods, Stephen J. Davis shows how Christian identity in Egypt was shaped by a set of replicable 'christological practices'. He thus enables readers to trace the Coptic church's theological and cultural transition from late antiquity to Dar al-Islam.
