An Eschatological Bestiary admits to different foci. Recording descriptions of natural history and popular accounts of climate change and inequality, its faunal composition offers symbolic visions, modern protest, and a complete exegetical interpretation of the dramatic rise of an apparently semi-permanent moral blank. Among its prime concerns and other sediments of stories are power relations and future events, their primary goal being to render the Big System unstable at a local level. To this end, words cut out of other sources serve to embody allegorical versions of imaginary animals in literature and art, providing chance significance to each animal's common misconceptions. In addition to glacial analyses, therefore, this 'sea text dream collection' preserves a record (including tents) of data relating to prophetic processes in any town's financial district, revealing the value of bad practice.
An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly important and popular literary genre Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind—an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry’s key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today’s most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. Prose Poetry explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry’ s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women’s essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.
This book explores the art of poetry writing from a practice-based perspective, showing how form, trope and theory inform the practical craft of writing poems. It is divided into three key sections: - Form and structure, covering sonnets, ballads, blank verse and more - Trope and device, introducing topics such as irony, imagery and voice - Poetics and practice, which discusses the writing of poets such as Robert Frost, Amy Lowell and Frank O'Hara Each chapter unpacks a particular concept or form, using examples to display it in practice. The book is filled with exercises to get you writing, and hints and tips for effective re-writing and for avoiding common pitfalls. Written by published poets, many of whom teach writing or literature, The Portable Poetry Workshop will push you to explore beyond your creative writing boundaries.
The fantasy of a sculpture that moves, speaks;or responds, a statue that comes to life as an oracle, lover, avenger, mocker, or monster—few images are more familiar or seductive. The living statue appears in ancient creation narratives, the myths of Pygmalion and Don Juan, lyric poetry from the Greek Anthology to Rilke, and romantic fairy tales; it is a recurrent theme in ballet and opera, in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and film. What does it mean for the statue that stands immobile in gallery or square to step down from its pedestal or speak out of its silence? What is it in this fantasy that animates us? Kenneth Gross explores the implications of fictive statues in biblical and romantic narrative; in the poetry of Ovid, Michelangelo, Blake, Rilke, and Stevens; in the drama of Shakespeare; in the writings of Freud and Wittgenstein. He also considers their place in the poetry of such contemporaries as Richard Howard and the films of Charlie Chaplin, Frarn;ois Truffaut, and Peter Greenaway. In the motif of the moving statue, we can see how the reciprocal ambitions of writing and sculpture play off each other, often producing deeply paradoxical figures of life and voice, Stories of the living statue point to the uncertain ways in which our desires, fantasies, and memories are bound to the realm of unliving objects. Clarifying the sources of our fascination with real and imaginary statues, this book asks us to reconsider some of our most basic assumptions about the uses of fantasy and fiction. Eloquent and evocative, The Dream of the Moving Statue will capture and hold a wide audience.
Surely you've lain awake at night to ponder life beyond time? Or dreamed restlessly of those multi-honored beast of Revelation? Or became frustrated because you don't know how to properly use your athame? How about all those times you came across a theological word that battered your brain? No problem. History and Mystery: The Complete Eschatological Encyclopedia of Prophecy, Apocalypticism, Mythos, and Worldwide Dynamic Theology has arrived, Here, just for you, are four volumes of exhaustive information that every student, teacher and interested person everywhere needs to know. Over 8000 defined words and phrases, 60 exploratory essays, and mini-sections of relational materials await. Before you know it, you'll be the best informed reader in your neighborhood and most of the next state over.
Leviathan, a manifestation of one of the oldest monsters in recorded history (3rd millennium BCE), and its sidekick, Behemoth, have been the object of centuries of suppression throughout the millennia. Originally cosmic, terrifying creatures who represented disorder and chaos, they have been converted into the more palatable crocodile and hippo by biblical scholars today. However, among the earliest Jews (and Muslims) and possibly Christians, these creatures occupied a significant place in creation and redemption history. Before that, they formed part of a backstory that connects the Bible with the wider ancient Near East. When examining the reception history of these fascinating beasts, several questions emerge. Why are Jewish children today familiar with these creatures, while Christian children know next to nothing about them? Why do many modern biblical scholars follow suit and view them as minor players in the grand scheme of things? Conversely, why has popular culture eagerly embraced them, assimilating the words as symbols for the enormous? More unexpectedly, why have fundamentalist Christians touted them as evidence for the cohabitation of dinosaurs and humans?
The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue--in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science--but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media, and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality; ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability, while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation's negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be understood historically, philosophically, and ethically. If translation never replicates a source exactly, what does it mean to communicate some elements and not others? What or who determines what is translatable, or what can or cannot be recontextualized? What linguistic, political, cultural, or historical factors condition such determinations? Central to these questions is the way translation negotiates with, and inscribes asymmetries among, languages and cultures, operations that are inevitably ethical and political as well as linguistic. This book explores how approaching questions of translatability and untranslatability through premodern texts and languages can inform broader interdisciplinary conversations about translation as a concept and a practice. Working with case studies drawn from the francophone cultures of Flanders, England, and northern France, it explores how medieval texts challenge modern definitions of language, text, and translation and, in so doing, how such texts can open sites of variance and non-identity within what later became the hegemonic global languages we know today.
Trans Historical explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives—literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts—that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.
A fascinating glimpse into the debate in Scandinavia concerning a number of inter-related Biblical themes focused on the concept of the Messiah, a debate associated with scholars such as Mowinckel, Pedersen, Widengren, and Bentzen himself. The argument traces the development of the Messianic figure from its Old Testament roots, starting with the Messiah of many of the Psalms, which represents a demythologised form of the Oriental conception of kingship, through the eschatologised Messiah of the prophetic thought of Isaiah and Micah, and then to the prophet-Messiah of Second Isaiah, which although still a present and entirely human figure, embodies the insight that the saviour of Israel must suffer and be cast in the role of a "Moses Redivivus" as leader of a new Exodus. The Son of Man of Daniel 7 carries this eschatologising process even further, until the Christology of the New Testament emerges as a creative synthesis of these Old Testament types. In this synthesis, Jesus is a new Adam, the Messiah present in the flesh and present still in His body the Church, the suffering Prophet playing the part of the new Moses and the once and future Divine King. Bentzen argues that ultimately this figure of Christ the Messiah transcends not only the Old Testament types on which it is based, but also the subsequent historical development of the Christian Messianic tradition.
This book enters a new liminal space between the LGBTQ and denominational Christian communities. It simultaneously explores how those who identify as queer can find a home in church and how those leading welcoming, or indeed unwelcoming, congregations can better serve both communities. The primary argument is that queer inclusion must not merely mean an assimilation into existing heteronormative respectability and approval. Chapters are written by a diverse collection of Asian, Latin American, and U.S. theologians, religious studies scholars and activists. Each of them writes from their own social context to address the notion of LGBTQ alternative orthodoxies and praxes pertaining to God, the saints, failure of the church, queer eschatologies, and erotic economies. Engaging with issues that are not only faced by those in the theological academy, but also by clergy and congregants, the book addresses those impacted by a history of Christian hostility and violence who have become suspicious of attempts at "acceptance". It also sets out an encouragement for queer theologians and clergy think deeply about how they form communities where queer perspectives are proactively included. This is a forward-looking and positive vision of a more inclusive theology and ecclesiology. It will, therefore, appeal to scholars of Queer Theology and Religious Studies as well as practitioners seeking a fresh perspective on church and the LGBTQ community.
