Empire & Odyssey

Empire & Odyssey PDF Author: Rock Brynner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book

Book Description
Yul Brynner, the mysterious and exotic Hollywood star, was one of four generations in his family to bear that name. His Swiss-born grandfather, Jules, arrived in Shanghai almost by accident about 1865, but within twenty years had become a leading industrialist in the Far East. His business association with Tsar Nicholas II built Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railway, then triggered the Russo-Japanese War, contributing to the fall of the Romanoffs. Jules' s son Boris regained control of the family's mines, but his experiences in China, Manchuria, and North Korea rivaled the ordeals of Dr. Zhivago. Yul's childhood took him to China and then to France, where, as a teenager, he performed in nightclubs with Russian Gypsies while becoming a trapeze acrobat in the circus. He moved to America before he spoke English and within five years was starring on Broadway. His son, with a colorful life of his own, has written the family's history.--From publisher description.

Empire & Odyssey

Empire & Odyssey PDF Author: Rock Brynner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book

Book Description
Yul Brynner, the mysterious and exotic Hollywood star, was one of four generations in his family to bear that name. His Swiss-born grandfather, Jules, arrived in Shanghai almost by accident about 1865, but within twenty years had become a leading industrialist in the Far East. His business association with Tsar Nicholas II built Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railway, then triggered the Russo-Japanese War, contributing to the fall of the Romanoffs. Jules' s son Boris regained control of the family's mines, but his experiences in China, Manchuria, and North Korea rivaled the ordeals of Dr. Zhivago. Yul's childhood took him to China and then to France, where, as a teenager, he performed in nightclubs with Russian Gypsies while becoming a trapeze acrobat in the circus. He moved to America before he spoke English and within five years was starring on Broadway. His son, with a colorful life of his own, has written the family's history.--From publisher description.

Ottoman Odyssey

Ottoman Odyssey PDF Author: Alev Scott
Publisher: Pegasus Books
ISBN: 9781643130750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
An exploration of the contemporary influence of the Ottoman Empire on the wider world, as the author uncovers the new Ottoman legacy across Europe and the Middle East. Alev Scott’s odyssey began when she looked beyond Turkey’s borders for contemporary traces of the Ottoman Empire. Their 800 years of rule ended a century ago—and yet, travelling through twelve countries from Kosovo to Greece to Palestine, she uncovers a legacy that’s vital and relevant; where medieval ethnic diversity meets twenty-first century nationalism—and displaced people seek new identities. It's a story of surprises. An acolyte of Erdogan in Christian-majority Serbia confirms the wide-reaching appeal of his authoritarian leadership. A Druze warlord explains the secretive religious faction in the heart of the Middle East. The palimpsest-like streets of Jerusalem's Old Town hint at the Ottoman co-existence of Muslims and Jews. And in Turkish Cyprus, Alev Scott rediscovers a childhood home. In every community, history is present as a dynamic force. Faced by questions of exile, diaspora and collective memory, Alev Scott searches for answers from the cafes of Beirut to the refugee camps of Lesbos. She uncovers in Erdogan's nouveau-Ottoman Turkey a version of the nostalgic utopias sold to disillusioned voters in Europe and America. And yet—as she relates with compassion, insight, and humor—diversity is the enduring, endangered heart of this fascinating region.

Mongolia

Mongolia PDF Author: Claire Sermier
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mongolia
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book

Book Description


Colonial Odysseys

Colonial Odysseys PDF Author: David Adams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501720422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
Works such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust explore the relationship between Britain and its colonies when the British Empire was at its height. David Adams observes that, because of their structure and specific literary allusions, they also demand to be read in relation to the epic tradition. The elegantly written and powerfully argued Colonial Odysseys focuses on narratives published in English between 1890 and 1940 in which protagonists journey from the familiar world of Europe to alien colonial worlds. The underlying concerns of these narratives, Adams discovers, are often less political or literary than metaphysical: in each of these fictions a major character dies as a result of the journey, inviting reflection on the negation of existence. Repeatedly, imaginative encounters with distant, uncanny colonies produce familiar, insular presentations of life as an odyssey, with death as the home port. Expanding postcolonial and Marxist theories by drawing on the philosophy of Hans Blumenberg, Adams finds in this preoccupation with mortality a symptom of the failure of secular culture to give meaning to death. This concern, in his view, shapes the ways modernist narratives reinforce or critique imperial culture—the authors project onto British imperial experience their anxieties about the individual's relation to the absolute.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey

The Lost Books of the Odyssey PDF Author: Zachary Mason
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9781429952491
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

Cricket Country

Cricket Country PDF Author: Prashant Kidambi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198843135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book

Book Description
The extraordinary story of the first 'All India' national cricket tour of Great Britain and Ireland - and how the idea of India as a nation took shape on the cricket pitch.

The Shortest History of Greece: The Odyssey of a Nation from Myth to Modernity (Shortest History)

The Shortest History of Greece: The Odyssey of a Nation from Myth to Modernity (Shortest History) PDF Author: James Heneage
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
ISBN: 1615199497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book

Book Description
Discover the cultural and political riches of Greece across 3,000 years, from classical might to modern rebirth. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read. Philosophy, art, democracy, language, even computers—the glories of Greek civilization have shaped our world even more profoundly than we realize. Pericles and the Parthenon may be familiar, but what of Epaminondas, the Theban general who saved the Greek world from Spartan tyranny? Alexander the Great’s fame has rolled down the centuries, but the golden Hellenistic Age that followed is largely forgotten. “Byzantine” conjures decadence and deadly intrigue, yet the thousand-year empire that ruled from Constantinople and saved Europe twice from invasion was, in fact, Greek. Greece’s modern chapter, too, tells of triumph and calamity—from liberation and expansion to schism, homegrown dictatorship, Nazi occupation, and civil war. Today’s nation is battered by austerity, encroaching climate change, and a refugee crisis—yet unwavering in its ancient values. James Heneage captures the full Grecian drama in this riveting, short history, revealing Greece as the wellspring of Western civilization—and a model that may yet save modern democracy.

Freedom Papers

Freedom Papers PDF Author: Rebecca J. Scott
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674068408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family's quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States. Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana's state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie's great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium. Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

Time and Identity in Ulysses and the Odyssey

Time and Identity in Ulysses and the Odyssey PDF Author: Stephanie Nelson
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813070155
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book

Book Description
A comparative study of two classic literary works, from a specialist in Joyce and Homer Time and Identity in “Ulysses” and the “Odyssey” offers a unique in-depth comparative study of two classic literary works, examining essential themes such as change, the self, and humans’ dependence on and isolation from others. Stephanie Nelson shows that in these texts, both Joyce and Homer address identity by looking at the paradox of time—that people are constantly changing yet remain the same across the years. In Nelson’s analysis, both Ulysses and the Odyssey explore dichotomies including the permanence of names and shifting of stories, independence and connection, and linear and cyclical narrative. Nelson discusses Homer’s contrast of ordinary to mythic time alongside Joyce’s contrast of “clocktime” to experienced time. She analyzes the characters Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, alienated from their previous selves; Telemachus and Stephen Dedalus, trapped by the past; and Penelope and Molly Bloom, able to recast time through weaving, storytelling, and memory. These concepts are also explored through Joyce’s radically different narrative styles and Homer’s timeless world of the gods. Nelson’s thorough knowledge of ancient Greece, Joyce, narratology, oral tradition, and translation results in a volume that speaks across literary specializations. This book makes the case that Ulysses and the Odyssey should be read together and that each work highlights and clarifies aspects of the other. As Joyce’s characters are portrayed as both flux and fixity, readers will see Homer’s hero fight his way out of myth and back into the constant changes of human existence. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Satire in Narrative

Satire in Narrative PDF Author: Frank Palmeri
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477301607
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book

Book Description
Virtually all theories of satire define it as a criticism of contemporary society. Some argue that satire criticizes the present in favor of a standard of values that has been superseded, and thus that satire is generally backward-looking and conservative. While this is often true of poetic satire, in this study Frank Palmeri asserts that narrative satire performs a different function, that it parodies both the established view of the world and that of its opponents, offering its own distinctive critical perspective. This theory of satire builds on the idea of dialogical parody in the work of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, while revising Bakhtin's estimate of carnival. In Palmeri's view, the carnivalesque offers only an inverted mirror image of authoritative discourse, while parodic narrative satire suggests an alternative to both the official world and its inverted opposite. Palmeri applies this theory of narrative satire to five works of world literature, each of which has generated sharp controversy about the genre to which it rightly belongs: Petronius' Satyricon, Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. He analyzes the features that link these works and shows how the changing pairs of alternatives that are parodied in these satires reflect changes in the terms of social and cultural oppositions. Satire in Narrative will appeal to comparatists, specialists in eighteenth-century and American literature, and others interested in theories of genre and the relations between literary forms and social history.