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Author: Regina M. Janes Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231546297 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 588
Book Description
Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs. In Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they would want or experience were they in that body. From this endlessly recurring situation, afterlife narratives develop in all their complexity, variety, and ingenuity. Exploring afterlives from Egypt to Sumer, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to Christianity’s advent and Islam’s rise, Janes reveals how little concern ancient afterlives had with morality. In south and east Asia, karmic rebirth makes morality self-enforcing and raises a new problem: how to stop re-dying. The British enlightenment, Janes argues, invented the now widespread wish-fulfilling afterlife and illustrates how afterlives change. She also considers the surprising afterlife of afterlives among modern artists and writers who no longer believe in worlds beyond this one. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions; contemporary literature and film; primatology; cognitive science; and evolutionary psychology, Janes shows that in asking what happens after we die, we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.
Author: Regina M. Janes Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231546297 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 588
Book Description
Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs. In Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they would want or experience were they in that body. From this endlessly recurring situation, afterlife narratives develop in all their complexity, variety, and ingenuity. Exploring afterlives from Egypt to Sumer, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to Christianity’s advent and Islam’s rise, Janes reveals how little concern ancient afterlives had with morality. In south and east Asia, karmic rebirth makes morality self-enforcing and raises a new problem: how to stop re-dying. The British enlightenment, Janes argues, invented the now widespread wish-fulfilling afterlife and illustrates how afterlives change. She also considers the surprising afterlife of afterlives among modern artists and writers who no longer believe in worlds beyond this one. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions; contemporary literature and film; primatology; cognitive science; and evolutionary psychology, Janes shows that in asking what happens after we die, we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.
Author: Gordon Mathews Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000826627 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
This book is about contemporary senses of life after death in the United States, Japan, and China. By collecting and examining hundreds of interviews with people from all walks of life in these three societies, the book presents and compares personally held beliefs, experiences, and interactions with the concept of life after death. Three major aspects covered by the book Include, but are certainly not limited to, the enduring tradition of Japanese ancestor veneration, China’s transition from state-sponsored materialism to the increasing belief in some form of afterlife, as well as the diversity in senses of, or disbelief in, life after death in the United States. Through these diverse first-hand testimonies the book reveals that underlying these changes in each society there is a shift from collective to individual belief, with people developing their own visions of what may, or may not, happen after death. This book will be valuable reading for students of Anthropology as well as Religious, Cultural, Asian and American Studies. It will also be an impactful resource for professionals such as doctors, nurses, and hospice workers.
Author: Edmund Gordon Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190626844 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 561
Book Description
The much-anticipated biography of one of the most beguiling and influential writers of the twentieth-century. With unprecedented access to its subject's personal records and informed by fresh, unvarnished anecdotes from family, friends, and colleagues, Edmund Gordon's biography provides the first full account of Angela Carter's amazing life and enduring work.
Author: Dustin D. Stewart Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198857799 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Explores the creative work of writers and theologians who used their poetic writings as a means to explore and envisage scenarios of embodiment and existence that extended to life after bodily death.
Author: David Eagleman Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307378020 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
At once funny, wistful and unsettling, Sum is a dazzling exploration of unexpected afterlives—each presented as a vignette that offers a stunning lens through which to see ourselves in the here and now. In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple, or that the universe is running backward, or that you are forced to live out your afterlife with annoying versions of who you could have been. With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.
Author: Bethany Layne Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527555364 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
The twelve essays collected in this work explore the afterlives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers in biographical fiction, or biofiction, and its sister genre, the biopic. The essays situate these genres in relation to their generic, cultural, and ideological contexts, and are organised into four groups. The first locates the origins of biofiction in the historical novel, and in Modernist experiments in life writing, while the second consists of case studies of biofiction about writers from the long nineteenth century: Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Rupert Brooke. A guest essay by novelist Maggie Gee opens the third group, which analyses the fertile sub-genre of biographical novels about Woolf, while the fourth and final part of the book concerns the related genre of the biopic. The volume is comprised entirely of original commissions, whose authors include postgraduate students, practitioners and specialists in biographical writing. It will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates on life writing and contemporary literature modules, as well as fans of the featured biographical novelists and their subjects.
Author: S. Ahlberg Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137479221 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 215
Book Description
Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction offers fresh readings of what has been called "transatlantic literature". In selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts it discovers a shift from oceanic, place-based knowledge to an atmospheric, placeless circulation of information. Consonant with the displacements of the Information Age, this book reads contemporary narrative as it imagines and navigates today's virtual spaces. An important conclusion of the book is that intellectual resources are finite and should be used sustainably. Thus, arguing against a conventional comparative approach, this book proposes reading practices that resist the tendency toward an oversupply of reworked literary contexts that seems bent on matching the reach of the World Wide Web. Instead, the book reimagines place as a practice in the way it is communicated and narrated. Ultimately, this book empowers the reader to reimagine a future for narrative in the Information Age.
Author: Nicholas J. Crowe Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527525775 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
The essays gathered here capture fresh perspectives on the literary environments of the eighteenth century. The core concern of this volume is culture – the ways in which it shapes literature and is in turn influenced by it: the “ways” of fiction. Especially commissioned from experts in the field, essays cover the whole of the century, embracing such themes as class, gender, nationhood, politics, and identity. Through scrutiny of familiar and less well-known authors alike, the collection forms a stimulating and provocative anthology. It will naturally appeal to scholars and students of the novel, as well as to historians of culture, and all those concerned with eighteenth-century studies. A broader readership will also find much here to enhance their appreciation of fiction as a cultural artefact. Responding to a growing fascination with this period in British history, these essays open vital new perspectives on the novel at a key moment in its development.
Author: Deborah Cherry Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317704517 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
South Asia is famous for its monuments, past and present. Monuments have been created, destroyed and rescued by competing communities and incoming empires in the making and re-making of history, identity and memory. This collection brings together an international cohort of senior scholars and younger researchers to examine the vast diversity of monuments (and conceptions of monuments) in South Asia from the 1850s to the present. The chapters investigate what constitutes a monument, and interrogate the conditions for its survival, demise or recycling. To explore the afterlives of monuments is to investigate how, where, when, and why monuments have been remodelled, re-sited, destroyed, defaced, or abandoned. It is to investigate the theories of memory, history and community, as well as new forms of artistic practice and global media. As different South-Asian communities claim a stake in the making of national, religious, cultural and local identities and histories, the status of monuments and debates about cultural memory have become increasingly urgent. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian Studies.
Author: Gene H. Bell-Villada Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190067160 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 665
Book Description
This Handbook offers a comprehensive examination of Gabriel García Márquez's life, oeuvre, and legacy, the first such work since his death in 2014. It incorporates ongoing critical approaches such as feminism, ecocriticism, Marxism, and ethnic studies, while elucidating key aspects of his work, such as his Caribbean-Colombian background; his use of magical realism, myth, and folklore; and his left-wing political views. Thirty-two wide-ranging chapters coverthe bulk of the author's writings, giving special attention to the global influence of García Márquez.
Author: Regina M. Janes
Author: Regina M. Janes
Author: Gordon Mathews
Author: Edmund Gordon
Author: Dustin D. Stewart
Author: David Eagleman
Author: Bethany Layne
Author: S. Ahlberg
Author: Nicholas J. Crowe
Author: Deborah Cherry
Author: Gene H. Bell-Villada