A Gust for Paradise
A Gust for Paradise

Author: Diane Kelsey McColley

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780252018282

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This beautifully illustrated multidisciplinary study addresses interpretations of the Genesis creation story in Paradise Lost and other seventeenth-century English poems and in the visual arts from the Middle Ages through the Reformation. It considers poems, visual images, and music concerned with divine and human creativity and interprets these works as salutary examples for the creation of the arts and the preservation of the earth. The central topic is the daily work of body or mind of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost as primal artists and caretakers of nature before the Fall, developing the arts of language, music, liturgy, and government, discovering the rudiments of a technology harmless to the biosphere, and dressing and keeping a garden that is an epitome of the whole earth. These unfallen arts promote awareness of the complex harmonies of creation and potentially of civilization: an awareness that is not only linear or binary but radiant and multiple; not only monodic but also choral. McColley argues that northern European visual artists and seventeenth-century English poets reimagined Eden in order to re-Edenize the imagination as a source of ethical and ecological healing. The best-known depictions of Adam and Eve in the visual arts, which focus on the drama of the all, depart from a widespread but undervalued tradition that more celebratory and regenerative and less susceptible to misogynous interpretation. This tradition includes the neglected topos of original righteousness and contributes to what we would now call ecological awareness. Poets allied to this view foster Edenic consciousness by creating a Paradisal language that weaves form, sound, image, metaphor, concept, and experience as closely as nature weaves life, and so exercises our sense of connections

Artificial Paradise
Artificial Paradise

Author: Kevin Courrier

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2008-12-30

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0313345872

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There is an epigram in this book from the Phil Ochs song, "Crucifixion", about the Kennedy assassination, that states: I fear to contemplate that beneath the greatest love, lies a hurricane of hate. On February 11th 1963, the Beatles recorded "There's a Place", a dazzling, unheralded tune which was included on their electrifying debut album, Please Please Me. This song firmly laid the foundation on which a huge utopian dream of the sixties would be built. Within that dream, however, also lay the seeds of a darker vision that would emerge out of the very counterculture that the Beatles and their music helped create. Thus, even as their music attracted adoring fans, it also enticed the murderous ambitions of Charles Manson; and though the Beatles may have inspired others to form bands, their own failed hopes ultimately led to their breakup. The disillusionment with the sixties, and the hopes associated with the group, would many years later culminate in the assassination of John Lennon and the attempted slaying of George Harrison by deranged and obsessive fans. In this incisive examination, author Kevin Courrier (Dangerous Kitchen: the Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams) examines how the Fab Four, through their astonishing music and comically rebellious personalities, created the promise of an inclusive culture built on the principles of pleasure and fulfillment. By taking us through their richly inventive catalogue, Courrier illustrates how the Beatles' startling impact on popular culture built a bond with audiences that was so strong, people today continue to either cling nostalgically to it, or struggle - and often struggle violently - to escape its influence.

Divided Empire
Divided Empire

Author: Robert Thomas Fallon

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 1995-09-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0271071559

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In Divided Empire, Robert T. Fallon examines the influence of John Milton's political experience on his great poems: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This study is a natural sequel to Fallon's previous book, Milton in Government, which examined Milton's decade of service as Secretary for Foreign Languages to the English Republic. Milton's works are crowded with political figures—kings, counselors, senators, soldiers, and envoys—all engaged in a comparable variety of public acts—debate, decree, diplomacy, and warfare—in a manner similar to those who exercised power on the world stage during his time in public office. Traditionally, scholars have cited this imagery for two purposes: first, to support studies of the poet's political allegiances as reflected in his prose and his life; and, second, to demonstrate that his works are sympathetic to certain ideological positions popular in present times. Fallon argues that Paradise Lost is not a political testament, however, and to read its lines as a critique of allegiances and ideologies outside the work is limit the range and scope of critical inquiry and to miss the larger purpose of the political imagery within the poem. That imagery, the author proposes, like that of all Milton's later works, serves to illuminate the spiritual message, a vision of the human soul caught up in the struggle between vast metaphysical forces of good and evil. Fallon seeks to enlarge the range of critical inquiry by assessing the influence of personal and historical events upon art, asking, as he puts it, "not what the poetry says about the events, but what the events say about the poetry." Divided Empire probes, not Milton's judgment on his sources, but the use he made of them.

Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts
Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts

Author: Jennifer Munroe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1317146344

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Ecocriticism has steadily gained footing within the larger arena of early modern scholarship, and with the publication of well over a dozen monographs, essay collections, and special journal issues, literary studies looks increasingly ’green’; yet the field lacks a straightforward, easy-to-use guide to do with reading and teaching early modern texts ecocritically. Accessible yet comprehensive, the cutting-edge collection Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts fills this gap. Organized around the notion of contact zones (or points of intersection, that have often been constructed asymmetrically-especially with regard to the human-nonhuman dichotomy), the volume reassesses current trends in ecocriticism and the Renaissance; introduces analyses of neglected texts and authors; brings ecocriticism into conversation with cognate fields and approaches (e.g., queer theory, feminism, post-coloniality, food studies); and offers a significant section on pedagogy, ecocriticism and early modern literature. Engaging points of tension and central interest in the field, the collection is largely situated in the 'and/or' that resides between presentism-historicism, materiality-literary, somatic-semiotic, nature-culture, and, most importantly, human-nonhuman. Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts balances coverage and methodology; its primary goal is to provide useful, yet nuanced discussions of ecological approaches to reading and teaching a range of representative early modern texts. As a whole, the volume includes a diverse selection of chapters that engage the complex issues that arise when reading and teaching early modern texts from a green perspective.

Gates of Paradise
Gates of Paradise

Author: V.C. Andrews

Publisher: Pocket Books

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1982118040

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Now a major Lifetime movie event, from New York Times bestselling author and literary phenomenon V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic, My Sweet Audrina) comes the fourth installment in the classic story of the Casteel family saga. Stunned by tragedy, a young woman finds herself desperate and alone, and clinging to the frailest of dreams. Can Heaven’s daughter find the inner strength to survive? The car crash that killed Heaven and Logan left Annie Casteel Stonewall orphaned and crippled. Whisked off to Farthinggale Manor by the possessive Tony Tatterton, Annie pines for her lost family, but especially for Luke, her half-brother. Friend of her childhood, her fantasy prince, her loving confidante…without the warm glow of Luke’s love, she is lost in the shadows of despair. When Annie discovers Troy’s cottage hidden in Farthinggale’s woods, the mystery of her past deepens. And even as she yearns to see Luke again, her hopes and dreams are darkened by the sinister Casteel spell…treacherous, powerful, and evil.

Intruders in Paradise
Intruders in Paradise

Author: John B. Sanford

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780252023439

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Now in his nineties and still writing as beautifully and dangerously and originally as ever, John Sanford is an American literary treasure - simply one of our most talented authors. A keen and incisive observation on the perilous and hilarious, absurd and appalling, Intruders in Paradise takes on the influential personalities that history has strewn across the Americas over the centuries and gives them their unfettered due. From Francisco Pizarro's chaplain, Valverde, to J. Edgar Hoover in a fetching frock; from the poignant voice of someone drowned on the Lusitania to the creative musings of Andy Warhol - Sanford burrows, as no other writer has, into the very souls of these quintessential characters and with his words engages them, powering them to vigorous and palpable life.