A Widow's Story
A Widow's Story

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2011-02-15

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 0062082639

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Unlike anything Joyce Carol Oates has written before, A Widow’s Story is the universally acclaimed author’s poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of Raymond Smith, her husband of forty-six years, and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. A recent recipient of National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Oates, whose novels (Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Little Bird of Heaven, etc.) rank among the very finest in contemporary American fiction, offers an achingly personal story of love and loss. A Widow’s Story is a literary memoir on a par with The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice.

The Hidden Chorus
The Hidden Chorus

Author: L. A. Swift

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2010-01-07

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 0191610402

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The Hidden Chorus investigates the relationship between the chorus of Greek tragedy and other types of choral song in Greek society. Choruses performed on a range of occasions in Greek culture, ranging from private weddings and funerals to large-scale religious festivals, yet the relationship between these everyday or 'ritual' choruses and the choruses of tragedy has never been systematically examined. L. A. Swift discusses choruses from five ritual genres: paian (religious songs of celebration or healing), epinikion (songs for athletic victors), partheneia (songs for the transitions of young girls), hymenaios (wedding song), and thrênos (funerary song), and explores how these choral forms are evoked in tragedy. By examining the relationship between tragic and non-tragic choral song, she not only provides new insights into individual plays, but also enriches our understanding of the role poetry and song played in Greek life.

Revisiting the Poetic Edda
Revisiting the Poetic Edda

Author: Paul Acker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-26

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1136227873

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Bringing alive the dramatic poems of Old Norse heroic legend, this new collection offers accessible, ground-breaking and inspiring essays which introduce and analyse the exciting legends of the two doomed Helgis and their valkyrie lovers; the dragon-slayer Sigurðr; Brynhildr the implacable shield-maiden; tragic Guðrún and her children; Attila the Hun (from a Norse perspective!); and greedy King Fróði, whose name lives on in Tolkien’s Frodo. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to the poems for students, taking a number of fresh, theoretically-sophisticated and productive approaches to the poetry and its characters. Contributors bring to bear insights generated by comparative study, speech act and feminist theory, queer theory and psychoanalytic theory (among others) to raise new, probing questions about the heroic poetry and its reception. Each essay is accompanied by up-to-date lists of further reading and a contextualisation of the poems or texts discussed in critical history. Drawing on the latest international studies of the poems in their manuscript context, and written by experts in their individual fields, engaging with the texts in their original language and context, but presented with full translations, this companion volume to The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Mythology (Routledge, 2002) is accessible to students and illuminating for experts. Essays also examine the afterlife of the heroic poems in Norse legendary saga, late medieval Icelandic poetry, the nineteenth-century operas of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the recently published (posthumous) poem by Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.