Author: Milla Cozart RiggioPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 146
Book Description
Rival Wisdoms
Author: Nancy Mason BradburyPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271098341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
In this elegantly written study, Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedded microgenres could be potent, disruptive, and sometimes even incendiary. In order to understand Chaucer’s use of proverbs and their reception by premodern readers, we must set aside post-Romantic prejudices against such sayings as prosaic and unoriginal. The premodern focus on proverbs conditioned the literary culture that produced the Canterbury Tales and helped shape its audience’s reading practices. Aided by Thomas Speght’s notations in his 1602 edition, Bradbury shows that Chaucer acknowledges the power of the proverb, reflecting on its capacity for harm as well as for good and on its potential to expand and deepen—but also to regulate and constrict—the meanings of stories. Far from banishing proverbs as incompatible with the highest reaches of poetry, Chaucer places them at the center of the liberating interpretive possibilities the Canterbury Tales extends to its readers. Revelatory and persuasive, this book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and early modern English literature as well as those interested in proverbs and the Canterbury Tales.
The Starry Wisdom
Author: First LastPublisher:
ISBN: 9781902197296
Category : Fantasy fiction, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This collection features contemporary visions of cosmic transformation, mutation, and madness. Here the primal beings of Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" stalk a postmodern landscape of social collapse, ethnic cleansing, genetic engineering, and nuclear devastation.
The Sorcerer's Tale
Author: Alec RyriePublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199570906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
An earl's son, plotting murder by witchcraft; conjuring spirits to find buried treasure; a stolen coat embroidered with pure silver; crooked gaming-houses and brothels; a terrifying new disease, and the self-trained surgeon who claims he can treat it. This is the world of Gregory Wisdom, a physician, magician, and consummate con-man in sixteenth-century London. Drawing on previously unknown documents to reconstruct this extraordinary man's career, Alec Ryrie takes us through the cut-throat business of early modern medicine, down to Tudor London's gangland of fraud and organized crime; from the world of Renaissance magi and Kabbalistic conjurers to street-corner wizards; and into the chaotic, exhilarating religious upheavals of the Reformation. On the way, we learn how Tudor England's dignified public face and its rapacious underworld were intimately connected to each other. Gregory Wisdom's career is an object lesson in how to conjure up wealth and respectability from nothing in a turbulent age. Praised as "an excellent snapshot of a time intrigued by the spiritual realm" (Los Angeles Times), this is a unique glimpse into a world intoxicated by new ideas.
The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature
Author: Carolyn Schmidt BrownPublisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870496271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Book Description
To Carolyn Brown s mind, the tall tale is not necessarily an account of the adventures of a larger-than-life hero, nor is it just a humorous first-person narrative exaggerated to outlandish proportions. It is as well an interaction between teller and audience a game played at the hazy border between the credible and the incredible, a challenge and an entertainment at the same time. The tall tale is also a social statement that identifies and binds a folk group by flaunting the peculiar knowledge and experiences of group members, and it is a tool for coping with a stressful or even chaotic world, for conquering life s problems by laughing at them.
The Invention of Suspicion
Author: Lorna HutsonPublisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191615897
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At precisely the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make their plays more persuasively realistic, more 'probable'. The result of this enormously rich conjunction of popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric was a drama in which dramatis personae habitually gather evidence and 'invent' arguments of suspicion and conjecture about one another, thus prompting us, as readers and audience, to reconstruct this 'evidence' as stories of characters' private histories and inner lives. In this drama, people act in uncertainty, inferring one another's motives and testing evidence for their conclusions. As well as offering an overarching account of how changes in juridical epistemology relate to post-Reformation drama, this book examines comic dramatic writing associated with the Inns of Court in the overlooked decades of the 1560s and 70s. It argues that these experiments constituted an influential sub-genre, assimilating the structures of Roman comedy to current civic and political concerns with the administration of justice. This sub-genre's impact may be seen in Shakespeare's early experiments in revenge tragedy, history play and romance comedy, in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, as well as Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, Bartholomew Fair and The Alchemist. The book ranges from mid-fifteenth century drama, through sixteenth century interludes to the drama of the 1590s and 1600s. It draws on recent research by legal historians, and on a range of legal-historical sources in print and manuscript.
Author: John Morgan-GuyDefending the West
Author: Ibn WarraqPublisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 161592020X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558
Book Description
This is the first systematic critique of Edward Said's influential work, Orientalism, a book that for almost three decades has received wide acclaim, voluminous commentary, and translation into more than fifteen languages. Said's main thesis was that the Western image of the East was heavily biased by colonialist attitudes, racism, and more than two centuries of political exploitation. Although Said's critique was controversial, the impact of his ideas has been a pervasive rethinking of Western perceptions of Eastern cultures, plus a tendency to view all scholarship in Oriental Studies as tainted by considerations of power and prejudice. In this thorough reconsideration of Said's famous work, Ibn Warraq argues that Said's case against the West is seriously flawed. Warraq accuses Said of not only willfully misinterpreting the work of many scholars, but also of systematically misrepresenting Western civilization as a whole. With example after example, he shows that ever since the Greeks Western civilization has always had a strand in its very makeup that has accepted non-Westerners with open arms and has ever been open to foreign ideas. The author also criticizes Said for inadequate methodology, incoherent arguments, and a faulty historical understanding. He points out, not only Said's tendentious interpretations, but historical howlers that would make a sophomore blush. Warraq further looks at the destructive influence of Said's study on the history of Western painting, especially of the 19th century, and shows how, once again, the epigones of Said have succeeded in relegating thousands of first-class paintings to the lofts and storage rooms of major museums. An extended appendix reconsiders the value of 18th- and 19th-century Orientalist scholars and artists, whose work fell into disrepute as a result of Said's work.
The Invisible Sentence
Author: Verna McFelinPublisher:
ISBN: 9780473562779
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 146
Book Description
A fascinating memoir from the wife of a prisoner and how her family survived outside the prison wire. Riveting from start to finish... the incredible story of how a woman and her family survived poverty and injustices, and yet received miraculous provision. How did a woman who suffered such trauma go on to change the face of the justice system in New Zealand and the world? Verna's and her children's lives changed forever when police knocked on her door one evening and her husband was arrested for a kidnapping, then tried and sentenced to eleven years in jail. While visiting various prisons over the next few years, Verna soon realised that not only were the prisoners serving a sentence, but the families were also serving their own invisible sentences outside the prison wire... "... a story of institutional maltreatment, of bureaucratic indifference, of the traumatisation and bullying of her children, of individual acts of cruelty and generosity, of hardship, of the value of collective strength and support-and of resilience and faithfulness in the face of adversity." -Sir Kim Workman KNZM, QSO
Author: Douglas Ripley Hotch