Robert Day has invented a new form, the Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind memoirs?brief, whimsical, sometimes touching, reminiscences about his brushes (often friendships) with literary greatness. He treats Shakespeare, William Stafford, Mavis Gallant, John Barth, Ray Carver, Walter Bernstein, and Michael de Montaigne. Some he met and knew in person; others he met in his mind. But the collision is sparkling in its reverent irreverence, airy, gossamer-thin, a playful and informal jeu d?esprit that takes itself not very seriously, yet with flashes of seriousness and wit.
This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication. He didn’t realize it at the time, but in the late 1860s, David Livingstone had disappeared and was presumed dead. He had been in Central Africa and out of touch with the world for 5 years. In November 1871, Henry Morton Stanley mounted an expedition to find him. Read about the famous encounter between Stanley and Livingstone along with other famous chance encounters that changed the world.
In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Fitzwilliam Darcy arrives at Netherfield in a state of indignation and delivers an insult that nearly ended his future before it began. What if he did not go to Meryton that autumn and instead met Elizabeth Bennet later in London during the winter? What if their introduction was not an insult, but rather a challenge to smile, and how does the strength of an extraordinary couple help them to survive all that life sends their way? Chance Encounters is a journey of the imagination, and explores how a resigned and wiser Elizabeth meets a hardened Darcy. It follows them and their families through their courtship, marriage, and beyond. Together they experience a mature love. Revised 2012 edition. This story contains scenes of a mature nature. Linda Wells is the author of Fate and Consequences, Perfect Fit and the Memory and Imperative series.
In the Renaissance and early modern periods, there were lively controversies over why things happen. Central to these debates was the troubling idea that things could simply happen by chance. In France, a major terrain of this intellectual debate, the chance hypothesis engaged writers coming from many different horizons: the ancient philosophies of Epicurus, the Stoa, and Aristotle, the renewed reading of the Bible in the wake of the Reformation, a fresh emphasis on direct, empirical observation of nature and society, the revival of dramatic tragedy with its paradoxical theme of the misfortunes that befall relatively good people, and growing introspective awareness of the somewhat arbitrary quality of consciousness itself. This volume is the first in English to offer a broad cultural and literary view of the field of chance in this period. The essays, by a distinguished team of scholars from the U.S., Britain, and France, cluster around four problems: Providence in Question, Aesthetics and Poetics of Chance, Law and Ethics, and Chance and its Remedies. Convincing and authoritative, this collection articulates a new and rich perspective on the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.
Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting. With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan Suleiman, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology, and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century, while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches.
The Thirtieth anniversary edition of THE Kansas cult novel--a wild romp across 1970s Kansas--with a new foreword by Howard Lamar, new afterword by the author, and a reprinted essay, "The Last Cattle Drive Stampede," that is a send-up of some of Hollywood's feckless attempts to make a move based on the popular novel.
A brilliant, lost feminist classic that is equal parts domestic drama and international intrigue. Shirley and Coenraad’s affair has been going on for decades, but her longing for him is as desperate as ever. She is a Toronto housewife; he works for an international organization known only as the Agency. Their rendezvous take place in Tangier, in Hong Kong, in Rome and are arranged by an intricate code based on notes slipped into issues of National Geographic. He recognizes her by her costume: a respectable black dress and string of pearls; his appearance, however, is changeable. But something has happened, the code has been discovered, and Coenraad sends Shirley (who prefers to be known as “Lola Montez”) to Toronto, the last place she wants to go. There the trail leads her through the sites of her impoverished immigrant childhood and sends her, finally, to her own house, where she discards her pearls and trades in her basic black for a dress of vibrant multicolored silk. Helen Weinzweig published her first novel when she was fifty-eight. Basic Black with Pearls, her second, won the Toronto Book Award and has since come to be recognized as a feminist landmark. Here Weinzweig imbues the formal inventiveness of the nouveau roman with psychological poignancy and surprising humor to tell a story of simultaneous dissolution and discovery.
British culture has changed almost beyond recognition since 1956. Angry young men have been displaced by Yuppies, Elvis by the Spice Girls, and meat and two veg by continental cuisine. What is more, as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales showed, the British are now more famous for a trembling lower lip than a stiff upper one. This volume, the last in the series, examines the transformations in literature and culture over the last forty years. An introductory essay provides a context for the following chapters by arguing that although there have been significant changes in British life, there are also profound continuities. It also discusses the rise of 'theory' and its impact on the humanities. Each essay in the volume concentrates on a facet of British culture over the last half century from painting to poetry, from the seriousness of the novel to the postmodern ironies of the computing age. What we get from this selection is not only an informed history of the relations between literature and culture but also a lively sense of cultural change, not least of which is the new found relationship between literature and other arts which ushers us into the new millennium.
This book responds to the pressing and increasingly recognized need to cultivate social wisdom for addressing major problems confronting humanity. Connecting literary studies with some of the biggest questions confronted by researchers and students today, the book provides a practical approach to thinking through, and potentially solving, global problems such as poverty, inequality, crime, war, racism, classism, environmental decline, and climate change. Bracher argues that solving such problems requires “systems thinking” and that literary study is an excellent way to develop the four key cognitive functions of which systems thinking is composed, which are causal analysis, prospection/strategic planning, social cognition, and metacognition. Drawing on evidence-based learning theory, as well as the latest research on systems thinking and its four cognitive functions, the book provides a comprehensive and detailed explanation of how these advanced thinking skills can be developed through literary study, illustrating the process with numerous examples from major works of literature. In explaining the nature and importance of these thinking skills and the ability of literary study to develop them, this book will be of value to literature teachers and students from introductory to advanced levels, and to anyone looking to develop better problem-solving and decision-making skills.
