Fictional Practice: Magic, Narration, and the Power of Imagination PDF Download

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004466002
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Tying on case studies from late antiquity to the 21st century, this is the first volume that systematically explores the inter-relationship between fictional narratives about magic and the real-world ritual art of practicing magicians.

Author: Bernd-Christian Otto
Publisher: Aries Book
ISBN: 9789004465992
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"To what extent were practitioners of magic inspired by fictional accounts of their art? In how far did the daunting narratives surrounding legendary magicians such as Theophilus of Adana, Cyprianus of Antioch, Johann Georg Faust or Agrippa of Nettesheim rely on real-world events or practices? Fourteen original case studies present material from late antiquity to the twenty-first century and explore these questions in a systematic manner. By coining the notion of 'fictional practice', the editors discuss the emergence of novel, imaginative types of magic from the nineteenth century onwards when fiction and practice came to be more and more intertwined or even fully amalgamated. This is the first comparative study that systematically relates fiction and practice in the history of magic"--

Author: David Brin
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 0307575020
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
From one of the most critically acclaimed and well-loved authors of contemporary science fiction, a highly imaginative and exciting story as only David Brin can write . . . “High spirits and inventiveness . . . Dennis's adventures, which can only be called rollicking, are legion.”—Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine Physicist Dennis Nuel was the first human to probe the strange realms called anomaly worlds—alternate universes where the laws of science were unpredictably changed. But the world Dennis discovered seemed almost like our own—with one perplexing difference. To his astonishment, he was hailed as a wizard and found himself fighting beside a beautiful woman with strange powers against a mysterious warlord as he struggled to solve the riddle of this baffling world. “A delightful, often very witty story, with the underlying thoughtfulness we expect from David Brin.”—Poul Anderson

Author: R. M. Berry
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079147920X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Combining creative and critical responses from some of today's most progressive and innovative novelists, critics, and theorists, Fiction's Present adventurously engages the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of contemporary fiction. By juxtaposing scholarly articles with essays by practicing novelists, the book takes up not only the current state of literature and its criticism but also connections between contemporary philosophy and contemporary fiction. In doing so, the contributors aim to provoke further discussion of the present inflection of fiction—a present that can be seen as Janus-faced, looking both forward to the novel's radically changed, political, economic, and technological circumstances, and back to its history of achievements and problems. Editors R. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo contend that examinations of fiction's present are most informative not when they defend philosophical distinctions or develop literary classifications, but when they grapple with elusive topics such as the meaning of a narrative present or the relation of fiction's medium to its representations of context. As the essays reveal, this process, when pursued diligently, breaks down traditional divisions of academic and intellectual labor, compelling the fiction writer to become more philosophical and the theorist to become more imaginative. The value of this book is not in the exhaustiveness of its treatment, but rather in the seriousness of the criticism it incites. The present materializes in quarrel, and it is toward such a beginning that the writings in Fiction's Present work.

Author: Jody Azzouni
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199780439
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way (using demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or false), such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flying horse," or "That elf I'm now hallucinating over there is wearing blue shoes." Standard contemporary metaphysical views and semantic analyses of singular idioms on offer in contemporary philosophy of language have not successfully accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things about the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things do not exist in any way at all (and have no properties). That is, philosophers often feel driven to claim that such objects do exist, or they claim that all our talk isn't genuine truth-apt talk, but only pretence. This book reconfigures metaphysics (and the role of metaphysics in semantics) in radical ways that allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of speaking of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial presupposition that such objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and so are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are about them.

Author: E. J. Clery
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052145316X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A genre of supernatural fiction was among the more improbable products of the Age of Enlightenment. This book charts the troubled entry of the supernatural into fiction, and questions the historical reasons for its growing popularity in the late eighteenth century. Beginning with the notorious case of the Cock Lane ghost, a performing poltergeist who became a major attraction in London in 1762, and with Garrick's spellbinding and paradigmatic performance as the ghost-seeing Hamlet, it moves on to look at the Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis, and others, in unexpected new lights. The central thesis concerns the connection between fictions of the supernatural and the growth of consumerism: not only are ghost stories successful commodities in the rapidly commercialising book market, they are also considered here as reflections on the disruptive effects of this socio-economic transformation.

Author: Susana Onega
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429000057
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction tracks the emergence of a new type of physically and/or spiritually wounded hero(ine) in contemporary fiction. Editors, Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteu bring together some of the top minds in the field to explore the paradoxical lives of these heroes that have embraced, rather than overcome, their suffering, alienation and marginalisation as a form of self-definition.

Author: Francis Mulhern
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317899091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Marxism has had an enormous impact on literary and cultural studies, and all those interested in the field need to be aware of its achievements. This collection presents the very best of recent Marxist literary criticism in one single volume. An international group of contributors provide an introduction to the development, current trends and evolution of the subject. They include such notable Marxist critics as Tony Bennett, Terry Eagleton, Edward W. Said, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson. A diverse range of subjects are analysed such as James Bond, Brecht, Jane Austen and the modern history of the aesthetic.

Author: Alice Bennett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137022698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Afterlife and Narrative explores why life after death is such a potent cultural concept today, and why it is such an attractive prospect for modern fiction. The book mines a rich vein of imagined afterlives, from the temporal experiments of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow to narration from heaven in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones .

Author: Ming Dong Gu
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 0791481484
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In this innovative work, Ming Dong Gu examines Chinese literature and traditional Chinese criticism to construct a distinctly Chinese theory of fiction and places it within the context of international fiction theory. He argues that because Chinese fiction, or xiaoshuo, was produced in a tradition very different from that of the West, it has formed a system of fiction theory that cannot be adequately accounted for by Western fiction theory grounded in mimesis and realism. Through an inquiry into the macrocosm of Chinese fiction, the art of formative works, and theoretical data in fiction commentaries and intellectual thought, Gu explores the conceptual and historical conditions of Chinese fiction in relation to European and world fiction. In the process, Gu critiques and challenges some accepted views of Chinese fiction and provides a theoretical basis for fresh approaches to fiction study in general and Chinese fiction in particular. Such masterpieces as the Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) and the Hongloumeng (The Story of the Stone) are discussed at length to advance his notion of fiction and fiction theory.