Author: Wiebe Karl Boer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789788457978
Category : Nation-building
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description

Author: Michael Wood
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520247246
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
In this companion to a forthcoming PBS series, Wood journeys to some of the remotest places on earth in search of four of mankind's most powerful myths: Shangri-La, Jason and the Golden Fleece, the Queen of Sheba, and King Arthur.

Author: Dean A. Miller
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080187792X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title From Odysseus to Aeneas, from Beowulf to King Arthur, from the Mahâbhârata to the Ossetian "Nart" tales, epic heroes and their stories have symbolized the power of the human imagination. Drawing on diverse disciplines including classics, anthropology, psychology, and literary studies, this product of twenty years' scholarship provides a detailed typology of the hero in Western myth: birth, parentage, familial ties, sexuality, character, deeds, death, and afterlife. Dean A. Miller examines the place of the hero in the physical world (wilderness, castle, prison cell) and in society (among monarchs, fools, shamans, rivals, and gods). He looks at the hero in battle and quest; at his political status; and at his relationship to established religion. The book spans Western epic traditions, including Greek, Roman, Nordic, and Celtic, as well as the Indian and Persian legacies. A large section of the book also examines the figures who modify or accompany the hero: partners, helpers (animals and sometimes monsters), foes, foils, and even antitypes. The Epic Hero provides a comprehensive and provocative guide to epic heroes, and to the richly imaginative tales they inhabit.

Author: Brad Kessler
Publisher: ABDO
ISBN: 9781591977643
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
This is a larger-than-life tale about the African American hero who was born with a hammer in his hand. Join John Henry on a scenic journey from cotton country to the wilderness, where he finds men of all colors working together to build a great railroad. In no time, John Henry becomes king of the railroad camps by driving more steel than any man alive. And, in an exciting contest that pits man against machine, he single-handedly out-performs a new-fangled steam drill. This rousing tale delivers an inspirational message about pride and perseverance.

Author: Ken Follett
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698160576
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1122

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Book Description
Ken Follett's extraordinary historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion. In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll. East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he'd imagined. . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.

Author: Antony Augoustakis
Publisher: Screening Antiquity
ISBN: 9781474454636
Category : Epic poetry, Classical
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Since 2000, numerous heroes of the ancient world have appeared on film and TV, from the mythical Hercules to leaders of the Greek and Roman worlds. This collection brings together a range of perspectives on twenty-first century cinematic representations of heroes from the ancient world.

Author: Michael DeMocker
Publisher: Purple Toad Publishing
ISBN: 9781624690525
Category : Heroes
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Who was the greatest hero of Ancient Greece? Who killed the most monsters? Who rescued the most damsels in distress? Who was the coolest dude in sandals? Listen to the heroes themselves as they tell the stories of their adventures and decide for yourself who was the most HEROIC HERO!

Author: Susan Ackerman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231132603
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Toward the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh King, Gilgamesh laments the untimely death of his comrade Enkidu, 'my friend whom I loved dearly'. This book examines the stories' sexual and homoerotic language and suggests that its ambiguity provides fresh ways of understanding ideas of gender and sexuality in the ancient Near East.

Author: Dwight F. Reynolds
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723235
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
An astonishingly rich oral epic that chronicles the early history of a Bedouin tribe, the Sirat Bani Hilal has been performed for almost a thousand years. In this ethnography of a contemporary community of professional poet-singers, Dwight F. Reynolds reveals how the epic tradition continues to provide a context for social interaction and commentary. Reynolds’s account is based on performances in the northern Egyptian village in which he studied as an apprentice to a master epic-singer. Reynolds explains in detail the narrative structure of the Sirat Bani Hilal as well as the tradition of epic singing. He sees both living epic poets and fictional epic heroes as figures engaged in an ongoing dialogue with audiences concerning such vital issues as ethnicity, religious orientation, codes of behavior, gender roles, and social hierarchies.

Author: Robin Lane Fox
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141889861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 611

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Book Description
This remarkable and daringly original book proposes a new way of thinking about the Greeks and their myths in the age of the great Homeric hymns. It combines a lifetime's familiarity with Greek literature and history with the latest archeological discoveries and the author's own journeys to the main sites in the story to describe how particular Greeks of the eighth century BC travelled east and west around the Mediterranean, and how their extraordinary journeys shaped their ideas of their gods and heroes. It gathers together stories and echoes from many different ancient cultures, not just the Greek - Assyria, Egypt, the Phoenician traders - and ranges from Mesopotamia to the Rio Tinto at Huelva in modern Portugal. Its central point is the Jebel Aqra, the great mountain on the north Syrian coast which Robin Lane Fox dubs 'the southern Olympus', and around which much of the action of the book turns. Robin Lane Fox rejects the fashionable view of Homer and his near-contemporary Hesiod as poets who owed a direct debt to texts and poems from the near East, and by following the trail of the Greek travellers shows that they were, rather, in debt to their own countrymen. With characteristic flair he reveals how these travellers, progenitors of tales which have inspired writers and historians for thousands of years, understood the world before the beginnings of philosophy and western thought.