The Spiritual Geography of Modern Writing PDF Download

Author: Constantin V. Ponomareff
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042001749
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This collection of essays deals with the spiritual crisis in modern society and focusses in particular on European writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The essays trace themes of spiritual unease, narrowing of inner human space, impoverishment of the self, growing human isolation, dehumanization, and the writers' attempts to overcome this malaise. The essays also try to show how inhuman political and social environments and feelings of cultural impasse can become mitigated and reclaimed by socially conscious acts of creative writing. Obsession, self-delusion, creative frustration and personal tragedy are seen to haunt this kind of modern writing which is at the same time infused with the writers' profound sense of moral responsibility to society and marked, on occasion, by that rare experience of Epiphany and transcendence.

Author: Kathleen Norris
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 054752756X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
“A deeply spiritual, deeply moving book” about life on the Great Plains, by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Cloister Walk (The New York Times Book Review). “With humor and lyrical grace,” Kathleen Norris meditates on a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth (San Francisco Chronicle). A combination of reporting and reflection, Dakota reminds us that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.

Author: Eric Weiner
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448168481
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
What makes a nation happy? Is one country's sense of happiness the same as another's? In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about who's happy and who isn't. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren't, and Americans are somewhere in between... After years of going to the world's least happy countries, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel and evaluate each country's different sense of happiness and discover the nation that seemed happiest of all. ·He discovers the relationship between money and happiness in tiny and extremely wealthy Qatar (and it's not a good one) ·He goes to Thailand, and finds that not thinking is a contented way of life. ·He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers they have an official policy of Gross National Happiness! ·He asks himself why the British don't do happiness? In Weiner's quest to find the world's happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, meditates in Bangalore, visits strip clubs in Bangkok and drinks himself into a stupor in Reykjavik. Full of inspired moments, The Geography of Bliss accomplishes a feat few travel books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.

Author: Nadine Farghaly
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443881368
Category : Monsters in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Werewolves, witches, vampires, demons, gods, zombies, and shape-shifters; these are just a few examples of the monstrous that society is confronted with. Most people have some knowledge about these creatures, and have had fleeting contact with ghosts, fairies, vampires and goblins, either in their imagination, or while reading, watching, or interacting with other people (whether in reality or the online world). From Beowulf and Buffy, to Freddy Krueger and Frankenstein’s Monster, this collection highlights different aspects of the monstrous, and discusses various ways in which they can be read, discussed, and understood. What does the mother in Beowulf really represent? How can the character of Zoey Redbird really be understood? What is the importance of memories in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? And what should we make of Terry Pratchett’s undead creatures? And what role does the children-friendly vampire play? Beyond the Night offers a range of insights into these topics, as well as many more. It presents the reader with a vast array of old and new creatures in popular culture, analysing the significance they have for wider society. This collection will also help readers to understand their favourite monsters better in relation to questions concerning sexuality, gender, social change, and otherness.

Author: Beate Müller
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042002173
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Parody is a most iridescent phenomenon: of ancient Greek origin, parody's very malleability has allowed it to survive and to conquer Western cultures. Changing discourse on parody, its complex relationship with related humorous forms (e.g. travesty, burlesque, satire), its ability to cross genre boundaries, the many parodies handed down by tradition, and its ubiquity in contemporary culture all testify to its multifaceted nature. No wonder that 'parody' has become a phrase without clear meaning. The essays in this collection reflect the multidimensionality of recent parody studies. They pay tribute to its long and varied tradition, covering examples of parodic practice from the Middle Ages to the present day and dealing with English, American, postcolonial, Austrian, and German parodies. The papers range from the Medieval classics (e.g. Chaucer), parodies of Shakespeare, and the role of parody in German Romanticism, to parodies of fin-de-si�cle literature and the intertextual puzzles of the late twentieth century (such as cross-dressing, Schwab's Faustparody, and Rushdie's Satanic Verses). And they have transformed the contentious nature of parody into a diverse range of methodologies. In doing so, these essays offer a survey of the current state of parody studies.

Author: T. Davis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230599508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Davis and Womack investigate the emerging gaps between literary scholarship and the reading experience. The idea of reconciling the void - the locus of our sociocultural disillusionment and despair in an uncertain world - concerns explicit artistic attempts to represent the ways in which human beings seek out meaning, hope and community.

Author: Derek Attridge
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1802070621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This volume brings together the most significant essays on South African literature by the distinguished critic Graham Pechey, who died in 2016. They combine an acute sense of the historical and geopolitical situation of South African writing before, during, and after apartheid with a sensitive ear to literary detail.

Author: Elizabeth Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350063460
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
For Virginia Woolf, H.D., Mary Butts and Gwendolyn Brooks, things mobilise creativity, traverse domestic, public and rural spaces and stage the interaction between the sublime and the mundane. Ordinary things are rendered extraordinary by their spiritual or emotional significance, and yet their very ordinariness remains part of their value. This book addresses the intersection of spirituality, things and places – both natural and built environments – in the work of these four women modernists. From the living pebbles in Mary Butts's memoir to the pencil sought in Woolf's urban pilgrimage in 'Street Haunting', the Christmas decorations crafted by children in H.D.'s autobiographical novel The Gift and Maud Martha's love of dandelions in Brooks's only novel, things indicate spiritual concerns in these writers' work. Elizabeth Anderson contributes to current debates around materiality, vitalism and post-secularism, attending to both mainstream and heterodox spiritual expressions and connections between the two in modernism. How we value our spaces and our world being one of the most pressing contemporary ethical and ecological concerns, this volume contributes to the debate by arguing that a change in our attitude towards the environment will not come from a theory of renunciation but through attachment to and regard for material things.

Author: Kristina K. Groover
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030325687
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf offers an expansive interdisciplinary study of spirituality in Virginia Woolf's writing, drawing on theology, psychology, geography, history, gender and sexuality studies, and other critical fields. The essays in this collection interrogate conventional approaches to the spiritual, and to Woolf’s work, while contributing to a larger critical reappraisal of modernism, religion, and secularism. While Woolf’s atheism and her sharp criticism of religion have become critical commonplaces, her sometimes withering critique of religion conflicts with what might well be called a religious sensibility in her work. The essays collected here take up a challenge posed by Woolf herself: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life's meaning in light of her disparaging attitude toward religion. These essays argue that Woolf's writing reframes and reclaims the spiritual in alternate forms; she strives to find new language for those numinous experiences that remain after the death of God has been pronounced.

Author: Robert P. Vande Kappelle
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666736317
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
People concerned with spirituality are seekers; instead of possessing truth, they seek to be possessed by it. Thus, a fully spiritual person is forever learning and growing. William Blake, the seminal mystic poet who worked to bring about change both in the social order and in common ways of thinking, taught that “all we need to do is cleanse the doors of perception, and we shall see things as they are—infinite.” And nothing cleanses—and enlarges—the doors of perception like great literature. Whether it be poetry, a short story, a novel, historical fiction, fantasy literature, or biographical writing, the literary experience is slightly beyond a reader’s horizon of understanding. When literature enhances spirituality—as is true of the dozen or more selections examined in Deep Splendor—each literary moment confounds in order to keep us forever enthralled, forever longing. The authors and works examined in this study explore timeless spiritual themes such as coming of age, relationships, self-integration, the struggle of good versus evil, the nature of change, and the corruptive aspects of power. When we think about great literature, it is easy to focus objectively on the literature itself, on what makes literature “bad” or “good.” However, another essential distinction involves the reader, replacing the category “good book” with that of “good reader.” As master teacher C. S. Lewis wrote, a quality of good readers is that they seek an enlargement of their being. Deep Splendor will teach you how to read great literature and how to be a good reader.