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This volume on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries starts with Vidyakara`s retrospect over anonymous poets (named ones having mostly found their places in earlier volumes). After some smaller anthologies a few novels and Mankhaka`s mythological epic we come to a historical epic. History is the most substantial source of matter for literature in the volume. That might seem to contrast with Vol. Vi, but as literature its aim is always are, not facts which narrows the gap.
In this innovative study of the philosopher Nagarjuna, Nancy McCagney demonstrates that the concept of space ('akasa') in early Indian Mahayana Buddhism is the root metaphor for Nagarjuna's understanding of 'sunyata', or openness. Nagarjuna's use of the term 'sunyata' was new, and contrasted with the word's use in Pali Buddhist literature. By using the word to mean 'openness,' Nagarjuna was able to elucidate, through a deeper analysis of impermanence, a consistent philosophical foundation for the truth and efficacy of Gautama's Middle Way. McCagney's book will be important for those studying Indian philosophy, Buddhism, and the philosophy of religion.
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Where do writers of fiction get their ideas? Clayton Koelb here takes issue with those who regard inspiration or imitation as primary forces influencing literary invention. He finds that another mechanism, which he calls "rhetorical construction," underlies much fiction and some nonfiction as well. Rhetorical construction, Koelb says, is a way of producing writing out of reading. The rhetorical writer begins by discovering an interpretive crux in a familiar text-a passage from the Bible, for example, or a commonplace expression—and then proceeds to imagine a fictional situation in which all the meanings of the passage, contradictory though they may seem, may be realized. According to Koelb, "inventions of reading" do not stop with the discovery of the eternal and inevitable deconstructibility of language; they somehow generate an urge to put language back together through the invention of a fictional world. Among the texts he discusses are writings by Boccaccio, Rabelais, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hawthorne, Hans Christian Andersen Nietzsche, Kafka, Calvino, and Flannery O'Connor.
The author examines the problems of religion critically from the standpoint of biology, psychology, metaphysics, etc. He makes a minute survey of metaphysical, psychological and political thinkers, their attitude towards religious concepts and a critical estimate of science and scientific investigations and in the light of these he builds up his own rational system of thought.