The phenomenal success of John Kennedy Toole's comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, is now legendary, a story that has long beckoned a deeper exploration into the life, imagination, and demise of the writer responsible for one of American literature's most memorable characters -- Ignatius J. Reilly. In Ignatius Rising, René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy present the first biography of Toole, drawing upon scores of interviews with contemporaries of the writer and acquaintances of his influencing mother, Thelma, as well as unpublished letters, documents, and photographs. Frank yet sympathetic, Ignatius Rising deftly describes a life that is dark, tragic, bizarre, and amazing -- but luminous with the gift of laughter, a life not unlike those of Toole's beloved characters, now loved the world over.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
In this expansive study, Bryan Giemza recovers a neglected subculture and retrieves a missing chapter of Irish Catholic heritage by canvassing the literature of American Irish writers from the U.S. South. Giemza offers a defining new view of Irish American authors and their interrelationships within both transatlantic and ethnic regional contexts. From the first Irish American novel, published in Winchester, Virginia, in 1817, Giemza investigates a cast of nineteenth-century writers contending with the turbulence of their time—writers influenced by both American and Irish revolutions. Additionally, he considers dramatists and propagandists of the Civil War and Lost Cause memoirists who emerged in its wake. Some familiar names reemerge in an Irish context, including Joel Chandler Harris, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate (O’Flaherty) Chopin. Giemza also examines the works of twentieth-century southern Irish writers, such as Margaret Mitchell, John Kennedy Toole, Flannery O’Connor, Pat Conroy, Anne Rice, Valerie Sayers, and Cormac McCarthy. For each author, Giemza traces the influences of Catholicism as it shaped both faith and ethnic identity, pointing to shared sensibilities and contradictions. Flannery O’Connor, for example, resisted identification as an Irish American, while Cormac McCarthy, described by some as “anti-Catholic,” continues a dialogue with the Church from which he distanced himself. Giemza draws on many never-before-seen documents, including authorized material from the correspondence of Cormac McCarthy, interviews from the Irish community of Flannery O’Connor’s native Savannah, Georgia, and Giemza’s own correspondence with writers such as Valerie Sayers and Anne Rice. This lively literary history prompts a new understanding of how the Irish in the region helped invent a regional mythos, an enduring literature, and a national image.
An Innocent Generation is an inspired tour de force that delves into the waters of politics, theology, history, and philosophy. In this book, Chiarot offers a uniquely poignant social commentary: the current generation, whether consciously or subconsciously, has taken a Nietzscheian approach to dealing with guilt. Rather than internalizing guilt and dealing with it, we have been taught to outsource our guilt. This unnatural process is at the root of many current societal ills. Chiarot chases the consequences of this paradigm shift down alleys that leads him to the door steps of everyone from Thomas Hobbes and John Calvin to Lady Gaga and Rip Van Winkle. Clever prose, careful analysis, and witty anecdotes make this both an enjoyable and educational read.
What was Paul's attitude toward his own death? How did he act and what did he say and write in view of it? What hopes did he hold for himself beyond death? Alexander N. Kirk explores these questions through a close reading of four Pauline letters that look ahead to Paul's death and other relevant texts in the first two generations after Paul's death (AD 70-160). The author studies portraits of the departed Paul in Acts, 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp's letter To the Philippians, and the Martyrdom of Paul. He also examines portraits of the departing Paul in 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, and 2 Timothy, arguing that Paul's death did not primarily present an existential challenge, but a pastoral one. Although touching upon several areas of recent scholarly interest, Alexander N. Kirk sets forth a new research question and fresh interpretations of early Christian and Pauline texts.
When nine-year-old C.J. Walker touches the arm of his mother's dead friend at her wake service and whispers the wish that she wouldn't be dead, he's just trying to do the right thing. But when the undertaker sees the woman's rosary sliding off her outstretched fingers and tumbling down her raised left arm, the firestorm can't be held in check. Frightened people near and far demand to know how many of their own loved ones might have been buried alive by the same undertaker, or by any undertaker. But proof that C.J. Walker can indeed raise the dead is secretly videoed, then publicly aired. In a single morning, C.J.'s mother, Lynn, watches their home becoming a fortress and her son becoming a target. Grieving individuals desperate to see death let go of their loved ones; representatives from news, medical, and scientific organizations; influential religious representatives; and powerful government agencies all move in to gain maximum positions of influence over the greatest power on earth. Through the ordeal, Lynn and her separated husband, Joe, struggle to find a way to escape with C.J., to keep him hidden from every pursuer, and somehow to make it possible for him to live a normal life again. But to do it all they must act quickly, before he's stolen away by authorities in high places.
Regnum Caelorum is a groundbreaking book that explores the largely overlooked connection in early Christian thought between understandings of the millennium and the intermediate state of the soul after death. Charles Hill traces Christian views of the soul's fate in Jewish texts, the New Testament, and in early Christian writers through the mid-third century A.D. His findings lead to a provocative new assessment of the development of Christian eschatology that corrects many misconceptions of earlier scholarly research. This second edition updates and substantially expands Hill's highly respected original work published by Oxford.
