Expressions of Fear from Antiquity to the Contemporary World

Expressions of Fear from Antiquity to the Contemporary World PDF Author: Ana-Cristina Halichias
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443896462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The volume offers a timely discussion of the feeling of fear, adopting a diachronic and complex perspective, taking into account its various forms, including its literary, mythological, anthropological, psychoanalytical, etymological, philosophical, theological, and historiographical representations, among others. It tackles the concept of fear in a range of time periods in cultural and literary history, from the Archaic Period and Greco-Roman Classical Antiquity to the modern and postmodern periods. As such, the volume marks an extremely relevant contribution to scholarship in the humanities, and will be of interest to scholars, professors, and students, as well as anyone interested in the analysis of profound human feelings.

Expressions of Fear from Antiquity to the Contemporary World

Expressions of Fear from Antiquity to the Contemporary World PDF Author: Ana-Cristina Halichias
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443896462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
The volume offers a timely discussion of the feeling of fear, adopting a diachronic and complex perspective, taking into account its various forms, including its literary, mythological, anthropological, psychoanalytical, etymological, philosophical, theological, and historiographical representations, among others. It tackles the concept of fear in a range of time periods in cultural and literary history, from the Archaic Period and Greco-Roman Classical Antiquity to the modern and postmodern periods. As such, the volume marks an extremely relevant contribution to scholarship in the humanities, and will be of interest to scholars, professors, and students, as well as anyone interested in the analysis of profound human feelings.

Fear and Its Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Fear and Its Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance PDF Author: Anne Scott
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Fear is a topic that appeals to a wide audience and is particularly of interest today. In the modern world, we fear war and terrorism, economic recession, and environmental degradation: these fears make up a great portion of the fabric of our daily lives. This is a volume of essays on fear and its representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In it, the authors raise and try to answer questions about the ways in which individuals, families, and nations five-hundred, one-thousand, or even fifteen-hundred years ago approached the idea of fear. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume and its editors (an historian of late antiquity and professor of literature of the Middle Ages) motivates an analysis of fear from a multitude of perspectives and within a host of secular and religious literature, historical treatises, scholastic works, art, and political accounts. The volume covers several main topics: Defining the Nature of Fear; Fear and Religion; Fear in Politics and Cultural Identity; Fear as a Literary and Dramatic Device; The Fears of Courtly Lovers, Knights, and Poets; Fear and the Mystic. Through its breadth, depth, and interdisciplinary focus, the present volume makes a full contribution to the study of fear in medieval and Renaissance culture for historians, art historians, students of language and philosophy and anyone interested in how people in the past have experienced fear.

Fear

Fear PDF Author: Jan Plamper
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 082297813X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This volume provides a cross-disciplinary examination of fear, that most unruly of our emotions, by offering a broad survey of the psychological, biological, and philosophical basis of fear in historical and contemporary contexts. The contributors, leading figures in clinical psychology, neuroscience, the social sciences, and the humanities, consider categories of intentionality, temporality, admixture, spectacle, and politics in evaluating conceptions of fear. Individual chapters treat manifestations of fear in the mass panic of the stock market crash of 1929, as spectacle in warfare and in horror films, and as a political tool to justify security measures in the wake of terrorist acts. They also describe the biological and evolutionary roots of fear, fear as innate versus learned behavior in both humans and animals, and conceptions of human "passions" and their self-mastery from late antiquity to the early modern era. Additionally, the contributors examine theories of intentional and non-intentional reactivity, the process of fear-memory coding, and contemporary psychology's emphasis on anxiety disorders. Overall, the authors point to fear as a dense and variable web of responses to external and internal stimuli. Our thinking about these reactions is just as complex. In response, this volume opens a dialogue between science and the humanities to afford a more complete view of an emotion that has shaped human behavior since time immemorial.

Fear and Art in the Contemporary World

Fear and Art in the Contemporary World PDF Author: Caterina Albano
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780230191
Category : Art and society
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This title provides an illustrated exploration of fear in contemporary art. The book identifies many manifestations of fear in art, from body terror and contagion to trauma and phobias, feelings of dislocation, displacement and alienation, narratives of guilt and shame, virtual fear, and fear as entertainment.

The Sense and Sensibility of Madness

The Sense and Sensibility of Madness PDF Author: Doreen Bauschke
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004382380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
This volume explores the sense and sensibility of madness in literature and the arts. As madwomen and madmen venture into unchartered or prohibited terrain, they disrupt normalcy. Yet, they may also unleash the liberatory and transformative potential of unrestrained madness.

Fear

Fear PDF Author: Joanna Bourke
Publisher: Virago
ISBN: 034900692X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
Fear is one of the most basic and most powerful of all the human emotions. Sometimes it is hauntingly specific: flames searing patterns on the ceiling, a hydrogen bomb, a terrorist. More often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source within: there is an irrational panic about venturing outside, a dread of failure, a premonition of doom. In this astonishing book we encounter the fears and anxieties of hundreds of British and American men, women and children. From fear of the crowd to agoraphobia, from battle experiences to fear of nuclear attack, from cancer to AIDS, this is an utterly original insight into the mindset of the twentieth century from one of most brilliant historians and thinkers of our time.

Fear in Early Modern Society

Fear in Early Modern Society PDF Author: William G. Naphy
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719052057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Fear of fire, flood, plague, invasion by the infidel, purgatory, death, witchcraft - these are just some of the fears that plagued the early modern world which are dealt with in this fascinating well-integrated collection of essays, based on extensive and ground-breaking new research. Drawing on British and Continental examples, the volume explores the panoply of personal and communal tragedies which tormented and terrified both elite and popular communities in this period, and shows how they formed strategies for dealing both practically and psychologically with their fears; it tells of the creation of the first fire service in France, of dog-massacres in times of plague in England, and of flood emergency plans in Holland.

Battlefield Emotions in Late Antiquity

Battlefield Emotions in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Łukasz Różycki
Publisher: History of Warfare
ISBN: 9789004462410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Battlefield Emotions in Late Antiquity' is a pioneering work, the first to present a comprehensive analysis of fear and motivation on the battlefields of Late Antiquity. By examining military treatises, Lukasz Rozycki identifies means of manipulating the morale of soldiers on the same and on oppossing sides, showingvarious examples of military trickery. The book analyzes non-combat properties of equipment, commanders' speeches, war cries, keeping up appearances, and other methods of affecting the human psyche. The book is written in the spirit of new military history and combines the methodology of a historian, archaeologist, and philologist, and also considers aspects of psychology, particularly related to the functioning of groups and individuals in extreme situations.

Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom

Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom PDF Author: Adam H. Becker
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201205
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
The School of Nisibis was the main intellectual center of the Church of the East in the sixth and early seventh centuries C.E. and an institution of learning unprecedented in antiquity. Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom provides a history both of the School and of the scholastic culture of the Church of the East more generally in the late antique and early Islamic periods. Adam H. Becker examines the ideological and intellectual backgrounds of the school movement and reassesses the evidence for the supposed predecessor of the School of Nisibis, the famed School of the Persians of Edessa. Furthermore, he argues that the East-Syrian ("Nestorian") school movement is better understood as an integral and at times contested part of the broader spectrum of East-Syrian monasticism. Becker examines the East-Syrian culture of ritualized learning, which flourished at the same time and in the same place as the famed Babylonian Rabbinic academies. Jews and Christians in Mesopotamia developed similar institutions aimed at inculcating an identity in young males that defined them as beings endowed by their creator with the capacity to study. The East-Syrian schools are the most significant contemporary intellectual institutions immediately comparable to the Rabbinic academies, even as they served as the conduit for the transmission of Greek philosophical texts and ideas to Muslims in the early 'Abbasid period.

Battling the Gods

Battling the Gods PDF Author: Tim Whitmarsh
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.