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These richly illustrated articles cover the representation of alchemy in art from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century. The authors, who are artists, curators and art historians from the US and Europe, address such topics as alchemical gender symbolism in Renaissance, Mannerist and modernist art; Netherlandish 17th-century portrayals of alchemists; and alchemy as the forerunner of photography. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
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This book visits the occult in literature from the 1880s to the 20th century, analyzing work by women occultists such as Alice Bailey, Dion Fortune, and Starhawk, and revisiting texts with occult motifs by canonical authors. It covers movements such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, Golden Dawn, Wicca, and Goddess spirituality, engaging with how literature creates occult worlds and identities, namely the female Lucifer, witch, priestess, and Goddess. The occult in literature incorporates topical discourses including psychoanalysis, feminism, pacifism, and ecology, hence this book will be of interest to scholars of literary and cultural studies, religious studies, sociology, and gender studies.
In our scientifically and technologically orientated society magic has not vanished - on the contrary. Literature, pictures, film, music and other art forms using magical themes and images are more popular than ever. The four parts of this collection - Magical Renaissance, Cultural Transformations, Scientific Perspectives, and Media Differences - illuminate the interface between magic, science, technology, and literature from Antiquity to the present day, providing theoretical frameworks on the one hand and case studies on the other. Taking into account wider socio-historical and cultural contexts, these contributions map out a complex field of artistic, scientific, philosophical, religious, historical and social discourses about magic.
Often regarded as an artistic movement of interwar Paris, Surrealism comprised an international community of artists, writers, and intellectuals who have aspired to change the conditions of life itself over the course of the past century. Consisting of a wide range of dedicated case studies from the 1920s to the 1970s, this book highlights the international dimensions of the Surrealist Movement, and the radical chains of thought that linked its followers across the globe: from France to Romania, and from Canada to the former Czechoslovakia. From very early on, the surrealists approached magic as a means of bypassing, discrediting, and combatting rationalism, capitalism, and other institutionalized systems and values that they saw to be constraining influences upon modern life. Surrealist Sorcery maps out how this interest in magic developed into a major area of surrealist research that led not only to theoretical but also practical explorations of the subject. Taking an international perspective, Atkin surveys this important quality of the movement and how it's remained an important element in the surrealist project and its ongoing legacy.
Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian are the three most influential poets from Northern Ireland who have composed poems with a link to the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union. Through their references to Russia the three poets achieve a geographical and mental detachment allowing them to turn a fresh eye on the Northern Irish situation.
The Lives of Texts: Exploring the Metaphor examines various instances of “textual subsistence” implied by the title. Drawing on the parallel between a text and a living organism, the contributors analyze various literary texts ranging from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, as well as film adaptations and the graphic novel. Apart from the works of canonical writers, attention is also drawn to some long-forgotten authors, along with the most recent instances of popular literature and culture. The exploration of the title metaphor allows the contributors to trace life-like phenomena (e.g. textual birth, maturation, dissemination, death and resurrection) in the texts of writers so remote from each other as Layamon, Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Charles Williams, Ursula Le Guin, A. S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Banks, J. K. Rowling, or Neil Gaiman.