Author: Frank Ashby Publisher: Trafford Publishing ISBN: 1426985231 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
In The Katabasis, a modern day convent-based mystery drama unfolds as a Jesuit priest and a nun enter into a psychological tug-of-war which culminates on the night of the Winter Solstice. Father Bennett realizes his true relation to the Sirian mystery. This discovery proves to be an integral factor in bringing about a baptism of fire through the Hidden God, which they both must endure. As a result of this baptism by fire, Sister Marcia undergoes a radical change in her ontological status from a quiescent nun to a moon goddess under the aegis of the lunar current. Father Bennett then embarks upon a journey which ends with a remarkable revelation about his true destiny in relation to the coming Black Aeon.
Author: Joseph Brassey Publisher: 47north ISBN: 9781477848210 Category : Alternative histories (Fiction) Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
With the death of the fearsome Ogedei Khan, the Mongol invasion of the West has been brought to an abrupt halt. The defenders, a band of brave warrior monks known as the Shield-Brethren, limp homeward again across a frozen, bloodied wasteland. But where--and what--is "home" now that the threat of invasion no longer shapes their lives? Thirteenth-century Europe has been saved from annihilation at the hands of the Mongols, to be sure, but new and terrible threats are at hand: political and religious turmoil threaten to turn the warriors' world upside down once more. Painted against a rich backdrop of medieval mysticism and Russian folklore, Katabasis weaves together the tales of victor and victim alike in a fearless exploration of what it means not just to survive, but to truly live again.
Author: Falconer Rachel Falconer Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474468136 Category : Hell in literature Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? Now available in paperback, this book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering - or discovering - selfhood. In exploring these ideas, this book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray, and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and identity; the ethics of the subject; trauma and memory; descent as sexual or political dissent; the interrelation of realism and fantasy; and Occidentalism and Orientalism.Key Features*Defines and discusses what constitutes Hell in contemporary secular Western cultures*Relates ideas from psychoanalysis to literary traditions ranging from Virgil and Dante to the present*Explores the concept of Hell in relation to crises in Western thought and identity. e.g. distortions of global capitalism, mental illness, war trauma and incarceration*Explains the significance of this narrative tradition of a 'descent to hell' in the immediate political context of 9/11 and its aftermath
Author: Gregory Dobrov Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195353781 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
Figures of Play explores the reflexive aspects of ancient theatrical culture across genres. Fifth century tragedy and comedy sublimated the agonistic basis of Greek civilization in a way that invited the community of the polis to confront itself. In the theatre, as in the courts and assemblies, a significant subset of the Athenian public was spectator and judge of contests where important social and ideological issues were played to it by its own members. The "syntax" of drama is shown to involve specific "figures of play" through which the theatrical medium turns back on itself to study the various contexts of its production. Greek tragedy and comedy were argued to be tempermentally metafictional in that they are always involved in recycling older fictions into contemporary scenarios of immediate relevance to the polis. The phemonenology of this process is discussed under three headings, each a "figure of play": 1) surface play--momentary disruption of the theatrical pretense through word, sign, gesture; 2) mise en abyme--a mini-drama embedded in a larger framework; 3) contrafact--an extended remake in which one play is based on another. Following three chapters in which this framework is set forth and illustrated with concrete examples there are five case studies named after the protagonists of the plays in question: Aias, Pentheus, Tereus, Bellerophontes, Herakles. Hence the other meaning of "figures of play" as stage figures. In the second section of the book on "the Anatomy of Dramatic Fiction," special attention is paid to the interaction between genres. In particular, Aristophanic comedy is shown to be engaged in an intense rivalry with tragedy that underscores the different ways in which each genre deployed its powers of representation. Tragedy refashions myth: in Bakkhai, for example, it is argued that Euripides reinvented Dionysis to be specifically a theatrical god, a symbol of tragedy's powers of representation. Comedy refashions tragedy: in a series of utopian comedies, Aristophanes re-enacts a tragic scenario in a way that revals comedy as a superior means of solving political and social crisis.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004375961 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 415
Book Description
Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition explores the theme of visits to the underworld in the ancient Greek and Byzantine traditions from a broad perspective including written sources, iconography and archaeology.
Author: Emma Gee Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190670509 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 385
Book Description
There are very few accounts of the afterlife across the period from Homer to Dante. Most traditional studies approach the classical afterlife from the point of view of its "evolution" towards the Christian afterlife. This book tries to do something different: to explore afterlife narratives in spatial terms and to situate this tradition within the ambit of a fundamental need in human psychology for the synthesis of soul (or "self") and universe. Drawing on the works of Homer, Plato, Cicero, Virgil, and Dante, among others, as well as on modern works on psychology, cartography, and music theory, Mapping the Afterlife argues that the topography of the afterlife in the Greek and Roman tradition, and in Dante, reflects the state of "scientific" knowledge at the time of the various contexts in which we find it. The book posits that there is a dominant spatial idiom in afterlife landscapes, a "journey-vision paradigm"--the horizontal journey of the soul across the afterlife landscape, and a synoptic vision of the universe. Many scholars have argued that the vision of the universe is out of place in the underworld landscape. However, looking across the entire tradition, we find that afterlife landscapes, almost without exception, contain these two kinds of space in one form or another. This double vision of space brings the underworld, as the landscape of the soul, into contact with the "scientific" universe; and brings humanity into line with the cosmos.
Author: G. K. Chesterton Publisher: Complete Father Brown ISBN: 9781717734907 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 58
Book Description
The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver. In a sky of dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless, black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold. Even the square stone tower of the church looked northern to the point of heathenry, as if it were some barbaric tower among the sea rocks of Iceland. It was a queer night for anyone to explore a churchyard. But, on the other hand, perhaps it was worth exploring.
Author: Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press ISBN: 1554588057 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Despite the painstaking work of Pound scholars, the mythos of The Cantos has yet to be properly understood — primarily because until now its occult sources have not been examined sufficiently. Drawing upon archival as well as recently published material, this study traces Pound’s intimate engagement with specific occultists (W.B. Yeats, Allen Upward, Alfred Orage, and G.R.S. Mead) and their ideas. The author argues that speculative occultism was a major factor in the evolution of Pound’s extraordinary aesthetic and religious sensibility, much noticed in Pound criticism. The discussion falls into two sections. The first section details Pound’s interest in particular occult movements. It describes the tradition of Hellenistic occultism from Eleusis to the present, and establishes that Pound’s contact with the occult began at least as early as his undergraduate years and that he came to London already primed on the occult. Many of his London acquaintances were unquestionably occultists. The second section outlines a tripartite schema for The Cantos (katabasis/dromena/epopteia) which, in turn, is applied to the poem. It is argued here that The Cantos is structured on the model of a initiation rather than a journey, and that the poem does not so much describe an initiation rite as enact one for the reader. In exploring and attempting to understand Pounds’ occultism and its implications to his [Pounds’] oeuvre, Tryphonopoulos sheds new light upon one of the great works of modern Western literature.
Author: Madeleine Scherer Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000682994 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern literature brings together a range of arguments exploring connections between the descent into the underworld, also known as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In the process, the volume explores how the hero’s quest into the underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own literary genre, a ‘memorious genre’ related to but distinct from the quest narrative.
Author: Frank Ashby
Author: Joseph Brassey
Author: Gary C. Shockey
Author: Falconer Rachel Falconer
Author: Gregory Dobrov
Author: 
Author: Emma Gee
Author: G. K. Chesterton
Author: Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos
Author: Madeleine Scherer