American Metempsychosis

American Metempsychosis

Author: John Michael Corrigan

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 082324234X

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American Metempsychosis explores the ancient concept of metempsychosis as a precursor to the idea of history. In the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, metempsychosis serves as a form of American self-knowing - the effort to reshape identity through a self's heightened awareness of its own cognitive succession.


Reincarnation in America

Reincarnation in America

Author: Lee Irwin

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-07-31

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 1498554083

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Reincarnation in America: An Esoteric History surveys the complex history of reincarnation theories across multiple fields of discourse in a pre-American context, ranging from early Greek traditions to Medieval Christian theories, Renaissance esotericism, and European Kabbalah, all of which had adherents that brought those theories to America. Rebirth theories are shown in all these groups to be highly complex and often disjunctive with mainstream religions even though members of conventional religions frequently affirm the possibility of rebirth. As a history of an idea, reincarnation theory is a current, vital belief pattern that cuts across a wide spectrum of social, cultural, and scientific domains in a long, complex history not reducible to any specific religious or theoretical explanation. This book is cross-disciplinary and multicultural, linking religious studies perspectives with science based research; it draws upon many distinct disciplines and avoids reduction of reincarnation to any specific theory. The underlying thesis is to demonstrate the complexity of reincarnation theories; what is unique is the historical overview and the gradual shift away from religious theories of rebirth to new theories that are therapeutic and trans-traditional.


The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements

The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements

Author: Ana Stevenson

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-02-03

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 3030244679

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This book is the first to develop a history of the analogy between woman and slave, charting its changing meanings and enduring implications across the social movements of the long nineteenth century. Looking beyond its foundations in the antislavery and women’s rights movements, this book examines the influence of the woman-slave analogy in popular culture along with its use across the dress reform, labor, suffrage, free love, racial uplift, and anti-vice movements. At once provocative and commonplace, the woman-slave analogy was used to exceptionally varied ends in the era of chattel slavery and slave emancipation. Yet, as this book reveals, a more diverse assembly of reformers both accepted and embraced a woman-as-slave worldview than has previously been appreciated. One of the most significant yet controversial rhetorical strategies in the history of feminism, the legacy of the woman-slave analogy continues to underpin the debates that shape feminist theory today.


Handbook of American Romanticism

Handbook of American Romanticism

Author: Philipp Löffler

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-07-05

Total Pages: 741

ISBN-13: 3110590905

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The Handbook of American Romanticism presents a comprehensive survey of the various schools, authors, and works that constituted antebellum literature in the United States. The volume is designed to feature a selection of representative case studies and to assess them within two complementary frameworks: the most relevant historical, political, and institutional contexts of the antebellum decades and the consequent (re-)appropriations of the Romantic period by academic literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.


Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media

Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media

Author: Aspasia Stephanou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-13

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 131539572X

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This book examines the manifestations of materiality across different gothic media to show the inhuman at the heart of literature, film and contemporary media, outlining a philosophy of horror that deals with the horror of the nonhuman, the machine and the nonorganic. The author explores how materiality lends itself ideally to discussions of gothic and horror and acts as a threat to attempts to control meaning which falls outside the realm of consciousness. It brings the two together by examining the manifestations of this materiality to focus on a form of horror that is concerned with the (in) human by reading blood as the conduit of an unnameable materiality that circulates through gothic media, seducing with its familiar mask of gothic aesthetics only to uncover the horror of a totally alienating and inhuman otherness. Film, media, popular culture, philosophy and nineteenth-century literature are brought together and juxtaposed to create a continuity of ideas, and highlighting differences. The book offers innovative readings of notions of blood inscription in different media, of the Dark Web, accelerationism and technoscience to account for the widespread haemophilia in contemporary culture. This title is an essential read for researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students in film studies, media studies, literature, philosophy, cultural theory and popular culture. Its interdisciplinary nature, clear exposition of thought and theoretical ideas will make it a key resource for both students and for general readers with an interest in contemporary horror, media and pop culture.


Walter Pater and Persons

Walter Pater and Persons

Author: Stephen Cheeke

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-06-20

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 019892027X

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Walter Pater and Persons investigates the vital concept of the Person in the work of Walter Pater, a major influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Stephen Cheeke explores the intersections of the person, persona, and personality in Pater's work; re-examines arguments about his famously personal prose style; traces Pater's ambivalent fascination with impersonality and asceticism; considers the poetics of personification in his writings about Greek myth and religion, in the divine logos of early Christianity, and in the theory of Platonic Universals; and explores his fascination with metempsychosis (the many persons through whom the individual soul transmigrates). Cheeke also explores the networks in which Pater was interpreted and misinterpreted by different persons and personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and W.B Yeats. Their (mis)readings of Pater, and rebellions against his work from Decadent, antinomian, and 'mystical' perspectives, reveal the ways in which Pater's writing had always been in a critical dialogue with its own thinking, as well as a prescient one in relation to his reception. The philosophical question of 'what is a person?'--a crucial one for the nineteenth century, and with an increasing urgency in our own times--is illuminated throughout this work.


Telegraphies

Telegraphies

Author: Kay Yandell

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0190901047

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Telegraphies reveals a body of literature in which Americans of all ranks imagine how nineteenth-century telecommunications technologies forever alter the way Americans speak, write, form community, and conceive of the divine.


Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness

Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness

Author: John Michael Corrigan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-11-16

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1009377817

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William Faulkner continues to be an author who is widely read, studied, and admired. This book provides a new and interdisciplinary account of Faulkner's legacy, arguing that his fiction is just as relevant today as it was during his own time. Indeed, Faulkner's far-reaching critique of his Southern heritage speaks directly to the anti-racism discourse of our own time and engages the dire threat to subjecthood in a technologically saturated civilization. Combining literary critique with network and complexity science, this study offers a new reading of William Faulkner as a novelist for the information age. Over the course of his career, we find an artist struggling to articulate the threat to human wellbeing in rapidly scaling social systems and gradually developing a hard-won humanism that affirms the individual and interpersonal life as a source of novelty and social change.