The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan PDF Author: Michael Davies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191649457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to religious history and from theology to post-colonial criticism. The Handbook is structured in four sections. The first, 'Contexts', deals with the historical Bunyan in relation to various aspects of his life, background, and work as a nonconformist: from basic facts of biography to the nature of his church at Bedford, his theology, and the religious and political cultures of seventeenth-century Dissent. Part 2 considers Bunyan's literary output: from his earliest printed tracts to his posthumously published works. Offering discrete chapters on Bunyan's major works - Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Pilgrim's Progress, Parts I and II (1678; 1684); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), and The Holy War (1682) - this section nevertheless covers Bunyan's oeuvre in its entirety: controversial and pastoral, narrative and poetic. Section 3, 'Directions in Criticism', engages with Bunyan in literary critical terms, focusing on his employment of form and language and on theoretical approaches to his writings: from psychoanalytic to post-secular criticism. Section 4, 'Journeys', tackles some of the ways in which Bunyan's works, and especially The Pilgrim's Progress, have travelled throughout the world since the late seventeenth century, assessing Bunyan's place within key literary periods and their distinctive developments: from the eighteenth-century novel to the writing of 'empire'.

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan PDF Author: Michael Davies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191649457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 760

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to religious history and from theology to post-colonial criticism. The Handbook is structured in four sections. The first, 'Contexts', deals with the historical Bunyan in relation to various aspects of his life, background, and work as a nonconformist: from basic facts of biography to the nature of his church at Bedford, his theology, and the religious and political cultures of seventeenth-century Dissent. Part 2 considers Bunyan's literary output: from his earliest printed tracts to his posthumously published works. Offering discrete chapters on Bunyan's major works - Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Pilgrim's Progress, Parts I and II (1678; 1684); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), and The Holy War (1682) - this section nevertheless covers Bunyan's oeuvre in its entirety: controversial and pastoral, narrative and poetic. Section 3, 'Directions in Criticism', engages with Bunyan in literary critical terms, focusing on his employment of form and language and on theoretical approaches to his writings: from psychoanalytic to post-secular criticism. Section 4, 'Journeys', tackles some of the ways in which Bunyan's works, and especially The Pilgrim's Progress, have travelled throughout the world since the late seventeenth century, assessing Bunyan's place within key literary periods and their distinctive developments: from the eighteenth-century novel to the writing of 'empire'.

Literary Visualities

Literary Visualities PDF Author: Ronja Bodola
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110378035
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book challenges the focus on pictoriality as central constituent of visual culture from the perspective of literary studies, which in the wake of an ‘intermedial turn’ so far focused on the ways texts relate to pictures and visual media either in praesentia (e.g. word and image studies) or in absentia (e.g. ekphrasis). Instead, it emphasizes literature’s participation in visual culture at large and focuses on three areas of investigation: (1) the depiction of, for instance, visual perceptions in the literary mode of description, which is paramount to formatting the mental aspect of visual culture; (2) the readerly practice of visualising situations and events of the fictional world, which mediates between those mentefacts and techniques of writing; (3) textual visibilities which are grounded in materiality. The volume explores these three areas from a systematically integrated perspective and the essays include in-depth treatments of seminal examples taken from Western literatures (primarily English and German, but also French and American literature) from early modern times to the present. This book’s aim is to work out literature’s active role in shaping visual culture, thus demonstrating its relevance for “image studies”.

Constructing Mission History

Constructing Mission History PDF Author: Stanley H. Skreslet
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506481906
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
Three master narratives currently dominate the analysis of modern mission history.?One puts foreign missionaries at the heart of the story.?A second emphasizes the colonial aspect of modern missions.?Here, missionaries are not heroes but villains, who are implicated in hegemonic schemes of imperial domination.?Thirdly, mission history is subordinated to one of its outcomes, the advent of World Christianity.?In this master narrative, the concept of contextualization looms large, bolstered by Sanneh's notion of translatability and emphasis on the agency of non-Westerners, who participate in and subtly shape the complex social processes of evangelization.?While all three of these master narratives are insightful, none of them adequately balances concern for missionary initiative and indigenous agency.?? Borrowing from speech-act theory, Skreslet offers a new analytical approach to the modern roots of World Christianity that differentiates between what a speaker might intend to communicate and the effects of what has been said or actions taken both in the moment and over time.?Corresponding to the concepts of illocution and perlocution as these technical terms are used in speech-act theory, the book is structured in two main sections.?Initially, the focus is on expressed missionary motives. Part two engages a representative set of modern-era mission performances involving many more actors than just the foreign evangelizers whose stated or implied intentions are emphasized in part one.

The Banishment of Beverland

The Banishment of Beverland PDF Author: Karen Eline Hollewand
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004396322
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
In 1679 Hadriaan Beverland (1650-1716) was banished from the province of Holland. Why was this humanist scholar exiled from one of the most tolerant parts of Europe in the seventeenth century? To answer this question, this book places Beverland’s writings on sex, sin, and scholarship in their historical context for the first time. Beverland argued that sexual lust was the original sin and highlighted the importance of sex in human nature, ancient history, and his own society. His audacious works hit a raw nerve: Dutch theologians accused him of atheism, he was abandoned by his humanist colleagues, and he was banished by the University of Leiden. By positioning Beverland’s extraordinary scholarship in the context of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, this book examines how his radical studies challenged the intellectual, ecclesiastical, and political elite, providing a fresh perspective upon the Dutch Republic in the last decades of its Golden Age.

Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues

Eighteenth-Century Novel and Contemporary Social Issues PDF Author: Stuart Sim
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748631313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This study introduces readers to the eighteenth-century novel through a consideration of contemporary social issues. Eighteenth-century authors grappled with very similar problems to the ones we face today such as: what motivates a fundamentalist terrorist? What are the justifiable limits of state power? What dangers lie in wait for us when we create life artificially?The book discusses key authors from Aphra Behn in the late seventeenth century to James Hogg in the 1820s, covering the 'long' eighteenth century. It guides readers through the main genres of the period from Realism, Gothic romance and historical romance to proto-science fiction. It also introduces a range of debates around race relations, anti-social behaviour, family values and born-again theology as well as the power of the media, surveillance, political sovereignty and fundamentalist terrorism. Each novel is shown to be directly relevant to some of the most urgent moral issues of our own time.

Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s

Louis MacNeice and the Poetry of the 1930s PDF Author: Richard Danson Brown
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 0746311850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
This study investigates Louis MacNeice in two major central strands, exploring MacNeice's ambiguous positioning as an Irish poet and the self-consciousness in his writing.

Empires of Belief

Empires of Belief PDF Author: Stuart Sim
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748626948
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Challenges all forms of fundamentalism and unexamined belief systems from a philosophical and sceptical viewpoint. Is unquestioning belief making a global comeback? The growth of religious fundamentalism seems to suggest so. For the sceptically minded, this is a deeply worrying trend, not just confined to religion. Political, economic, and scientific theories can demand the same unquestioning obedience from the general public. Stuart Sim outlines the history of scepticism in both the Western and Islamic cultural traditions, and from the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Setting out what a sceptical politics might be like, Empires of Belief argues that we need less belief and more doubt: an engaged scepticism to replace the pervasive dogmatism that threatens our democracies.

Saving Beauty

Saving Beauty PDF Author: Veronica Donnelly
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039107230
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Balthasar is one of the most influential of Catholic twentieth-century theologians, and his oeuvre is astonishing in its range and amplitude. This together with a style of writing that is cyclic rather than systematic makes his work difficult to assimilate. The author has overcome this obstacle by finding an integrating motif that makes coherent sense of the whole. That motif is the concept of 'form'. The first section of the book deals with that 'form': its genesis, its meaning as a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts, and as a revelation of the mystery of Being. Section two shows how, when the concept is applied christologically, it signifies the incarnate form of Jesus as expressing the glory of the triune God, the source of Being. Section three, which deals specifically with Balthasar's soteriology, demonstrates how because of his mission to save a sinful world the form of Jesus has to undergo suffering and death and become apparently 'formless'. While indicating that the main lines of Balthasar's theology are rooted in tradition, the book also illustrates the radicalness of his approach. His dialogue with theologians and philosophers, both ancient and modern, is discussed and evaluated throughout.

Bible and Novel

Bible and Novel PDF Author: Norman Vance
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191501891
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The Victorian novel acquired greater cultural centrality just as the authority of the scriptures and of traditional religious teaching seemed to be declining. Did the novel supplant the Bible? The novelists often adopted or participated in a broadly progressive narrative of social change which can be seen as a secular replacement for the theological narrative of 'salvation history' and the waning authority of biblical narrative. Victorian fiction seems in some ways to enact the process of secularization. But contemporary religious resurgence in various parts of the world and postmodern scepticism about grand narratives have challenged and complicated the conventional view of secularization as an irreversible process, an inevitable 'disenchantment of the world' which is an aspect and function of the grand narrative of modernization. Such developments raise new questions about apparently post-Christian Victorian fiction. In our increasingly secular society novel-reading is now more popular than Bible-reading. Serious novels are often taken more seriously than scripture. Norman Vance looks at how this may have come about as an introduction to four best-selling late-Victorian novelists: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mary Ward and Rider Haggard. Does the novel in their hands take the place of the Bible? Can apparently secular novels still have religious significance? Can they make new imaginative sense of some of the religious and moral themes and experiences to be found in the Bible? Do Eliot and her successors anticipate some of the insights of modern theology and contemporary investigations of religious experience? Do they call in question long-standing rumours of the death of God and the triumph of the secular? Bible and Novel develops a new context for reading later Victorian fiction, using it to illuminate the increasingly perplexed and confusing issue of 'secularization' and recent negotiations of the 'post-secular'.

The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger

The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger PDF Author: Nathalie Morris
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838719164
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were true visionaries of British cinema, creating glorious Technicolor masterpieces including A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). Delving into their magical and obsessive worlds, this lavishly-illustrated publication presents fresh perspectives on the filmmaking duo, shining the spotlight not only on them, but also on their circle of talented collaborators. Thelma Schoonmaker, Caitlin McDonald, Alexandra Harris, Mahesh Rao, Sarah Street, Ian Christie and Marina Warner write about the key figures who shared Powell and Pressburger's creative journey, and Tilda Swinton, Tim Walker, Sarah Greenwood, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Sandy Powell, Joanna Hogg and Stephen Jones reflect on the ways in which Powell and Pressburger's stories and images have haunted and inspired them in their own work. The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger draws on the BFI's stunning design and archive collections, as well as key objects held in other public and private collections.