Author: Allan Kilner-Johnson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350255327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
Probing the relationship between modernist literary experimentation and several key strands of occult practice which emerged in Europe from roughly 1894 to 1944, this book sets the work of leading modernist writers alongside lesser known female writers and writers in languages other than English to more fully portray the aesthetic and philosophical connections between modernism and the occult. Although the early decades of the twentieth century-the era of cocktails, motorcars, bobbed hair, and war-are often described as a period of newness and innovation, many writers of the time found inspiration and visionary brilliance by turning to the mysterious occult past. This book's principle intervention is to reimagine the contours and boundaries of literary modernism by welcoming into the conversation a number of significant female writers and writers in languages other than English who are often still relegated to the fringes of modernist studies. Well-remembered poets and novelists such as Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and Aleister Crowley were tied to occult beliefs, and this book sets these leading figures alongside less well-remembered but equally splendid modernists including Paul Brunton, Mary Butts, Alexandra David-Neel, Florence Farr, Dion Fortune, Hermann Hesse, and Rudolf Steiner. From the little magazines where occultism and Fabianism were comfortable companions, to consulting rooms of psychoanalysts where archetypes were revealed to be both mystical and mundane, to the forbidden mountain trails that led to formidable spiritual teachers, the conditions of modernism were invariably those conditions which inspired a return to the occult traditions that many thinkers believed had long evaporated. Indeed, in many ways these traditions were the making of the modern world. By uncovering hidden hopes and anxieties that faced a newly modern Western Europe, this book demonstrates how literary modernists understood occultism as a universal form of cultural expression which has inspired creative exuberance since the dawn of civilisation.
Author: Allan Kilner-Johnson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350255319
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
Probing the relationship between modernist literary experimentation and several key strands of occult practice which emerged in Europe from roughly 1894 to 1944, this book sets the work of leading modernist writers alongside lesser known female writers and writers in languages other than English to more fully portray the aesthetic and philosophical connections between modernism and the occult. Although the early decades of the twentieth century-the era of cocktails, motorcars, bobbed hair, and war-are often described as a period of newness and innovation, many writers of the time found inspiration and visionary brilliance by turning to the mysterious occult past. This book's principle intervention is to reimagine the contours and boundaries of literary modernism by welcoming into the conversation a number of significant female writers and writers in languages other than English who are often still relegated to the fringes of modernist studies. Well-remembered poets and novelists such as Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and Aleister Crowley were tied to occult beliefs, and this book sets these leading figures alongside less well-remembered but equally splendid modernists including Paul Brunton, Mary Butts, Alexandra David-Neel, Florence Farr, Dion Fortune, Hermann Hesse, and Rudolf Steiner. From the little magazines where occultism and Fabianism were comfortable companions, to consulting rooms of psychoanalysts where archetypes were revealed to be both mystical and mundane, to the forbidden mountain trails that led to formidable spiritual teachers, the conditions of modernism were invariably those conditions which inspired a return to the occult traditions that many thinkers believed had long evaporated. Indeed, in many ways these traditions were the making of the modern world. By uncovering hidden hopes and anxieties that faced a newly modern Western Europe, this book demonstrates how literary modernists understood occultism as a universal form of cultural expression which has inspired creative exuberance since the dawn of civilisation.
Author: Charles R. Embry
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826219152
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
These essays supply a theoretical grounding for the reading of novels, poems, and plays and reveal how the Voegelinian perspective exposes the existential and philosophical dimensions of the literary works themselves. As a unit, this collection of essays shows how modern pieces of literature can symbolize their creators' participation in the human search for the truth of existence--just as myths, philosophical works, and religious texts always have. Voegelin's primary concern as a philosopher was to expose the roots of the disturbances of the modern era--religious conflict, imperialism, war--so that the sources of order leading to meaning are revealed. The openness of Voegelinian thought and the many ways he considered the levels of reality generate intriguing themes for literary criticism.
Author: Isobel Armstrong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351192418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
"Essays, short stories and poems by eminent creative writers, critics and scholars from three continents celebrate the literary achievements of Barbara Hardy, the foremost exponent of close critical reading in the latter half of the twentieth century and today. Her work, as the essays in the volume bear witness, encompasses 19th and 20th century British fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare. In addition to an introduction outlining and assessing Hardy's career and writing, there is an extensive bibliography of her work. Comparatively short, concise essays, stories and poems by twenty distinguished hands express the eclectic nature of Barbara Hardy's work and themselves form a many-faceted critical/creative gathering. Form and Feeling moves away from the traditional festschrift to create an innovative critical genre that reflects the variety and nature of its subject's work. In addition to Barbara Hardy's own writing, authors and subjects treated include Anglo-Welsh poetry, nineteenth century fiction, Margaret Atwood, Wilkie Collins, Ivy Compton Burnet, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. M. Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Shakespeare, and W. B. Yeats, amongst others."
Author: Aníbal González
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822983028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
In Search of the Sacred Book studies the artistic incorporation of religious concepts such as prophecy, eternity, and the afterlife in the contemporary Latin American novel. It departs from sociopolitical readings by noting the continued relevance of religion in Latin American life and culture, despite modernity's powerful secularizing influence. Analyzing Jorge Luis Borges's secularized "narrative theology" in his essays and short stories, the book follows the development of the Latin American novel from the early twentieth century until today by examining the attempts of major novelists, from María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo, to Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and José Lezama Lima, to "sacralize" the novel by incorporating traits present in the sacred texts of many religions. It concludes with a view of the "desacralization" of the novel by more recent authors, from Elena Poniatowska and Fernando Vallejo to Roberto Bolaño.
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 24
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Book Description
Author: Philip Rieff
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813925165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Rieff articulates a comprehensive, typological theory of Western culture. Using visual illustrations, he contrasts the changing modes of spiritual and social thought that have struggled for dominance throughout Western history.
Author: Benjamin C. Parris
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501764519
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
Vital Strife examines the close yet puzzling relationship between sleep and ethical care in early modernity. The plays, poems, and philosophical essays at the heart of this book—by Jasper Heywood, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish—explore the unconscious motions of corporeal life and the drowsy forms of sentience at the boundaries of human thought and intentionality. Benjamin Parris shows how these writers, although trained under the Renaissance humanist paradigm of attentive care, begin to dissolve the humanist coupling of virtue with vigilance by giving credence to the vital power of sleep. In contrast to humanist thinkers who equated sleep with carelessness, these writers draw on the ancient Stoic principle of oikeiôsis—the process of orienting the living being toward its proper objects of care, beginning with itself—in asserting the value of sleep, while underscoring insomnia's threat to the ethical flourishing of persons and polity alike. Parris offers an important revaluation of Stoic philosophy, which has too often been misconstrued as renouncing feeling and sympathetic connection with others. With its striking new account of the reception of Stoicism and attitudes toward sleep and sleeplessness in early modern thought, Vital Strife reveals the period's mounting concern with the regenerative nature of physical life and its elaboration of a newfound ethics of care.
Author: Edward Adams Cantrell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 76
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Book Description
Author: Noël Valis
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300152353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 580
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Book Description
In this thoughtful and compelling book, leading Spanish literature scholar Noël Valis re-examines the role of Catholicism in the modern Spanish novel. While other studies of fiction and faith have focused largely on religious themes, Sacred Realism views the religious impulse as a crisis of modernity: a fundamental catalyst in the creative and moral development of Spanish narrative.
