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The Fiction of Ruth Rendell
A study of the role of family, ancient Greek narratives, and the psychological theories of Freud and Jung in the mystery novels of Ruth Rendell. Aside from Ruth Rendell’s brilliance as a fiction writer, and her appeal to mystery lovers, her books portray a compelling, universal experience that her readers can immediately relate to, the intra-familial stresses generated by the nuclear family. Even those who experience the joys as well as pains of family life will find in Rendell the conflicts that beset all who must navigate their way through the conflicts that beset members of the closest families. Barbara Fass Leavy analyzes the multi-leveled treatment of these themes that contributes to ...
To Blight with Plague
"A sensitive, intelligent book." —Sander L. Gilman, Professor of Humane Studies, Cornell University How is AIDS treated in the contemporary plays of Larry Kramer and William Hoffman? How important is the Black Death to a reader of Boccaccio's Decameron? How have the historical and current outbreaks of contagious disease affected the creation of literature, and how has this literature in turn shaped our response to disease? Original and moving, To Blight with Plague addresses these and other central questions raised by literary works whose main themes revolve around contagious, epidemic disease and its social and psychological consequences.
In Search of the Swan Maiden
Challenges the conventional interpretations of the worldwide folktale in which a swan maiden is captured, forced to marry and serve a human man, and eventually finds the key (usually her old skin) and escapes. Leavy (English, City U. of New York) considers the motive in the context of other animal brides, and animal grooms, and finds women socializing other women in a man's world, how myths of feminine evil spread, and how ominous meanings are obscured by traditional happy endings. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Arthurian Women
Featuring three original and 14 classic essays, this volume examines literary representations of women in Arthuriana and how women artists have viewed them. The essays discuss the female characters in Arthurian legend, medieval and modern readers of the legend, modern critics and the modern women writers who have recast the Arthurian inheritance, and finally women visual artists who have used the material of the Arthurian story. All the essays concentrate interpretation on a female creator and the work. This collection contains a useful bibliography of material devoted to female characters in Arthurian literature.
Dead Secrets
Readers have long been enthralled by the novels of Wilkie Collins, whose The Moonstone is considered the first modern detective novel, This book by Tamar Heller places Collins within Victorian literary history, showing how his fiction transforms the conventions of the traditionally female genre of the Gothic novel and can be read as a critique of the gender and class distinctions that structured Victorian society.
Splitting the Difference
Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are doubled. This text recounts and compares a range of these. The comparisons show that differences in gender are more significant than differences in culture.
Religion and Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Issues of sexuality and gender are hotly contested in both religious communities and national cultures around the world. In the social sciences, religious traditions are often depicted as inherently conservative or even reactionary in their commitments to powerful patriarchal and pronatalist sexual norms and gender categories. In illuminating the practices of religious traditions in various cultures, these essays expose the diversity of religious rituals and mythologies pertaining to sexuality. In the process the contributors challenge conventional notions of what is normative in our sexual lives.
Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature
Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature examines three diseases--leprosy, bubonic plague, and syphilis--to show how doctors, priests, and literary authors from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance interpreted certain illnesses through a moral filter. Lacking knowledge about the transmission of contagious diseases, doctors and priests saw epidemic diseases as a punishment sent by God for human transgression. Accordingly, their job was to properly read sickness in relation to the sin. By examining different readings of specific illnesses, this book shows how the social construction of epidemic diseases formed a kind of narrative wherein man attempts to take the control of the disease out of God's hands by connecting epidemic diseases to the sins of carnality.
Plague: A Very Short Introduction
Throughout history plague has been the cause of many major catastrophes. It was responsible for the Black Death of 1348 and the Great Plague of London in 1665, and for devastating epidemics much earlier and much later, in the Mediterranean in the sixth century, and in China and India between the 1890s and 1920s. Today, it has become a metaphor for other epidemic disasters which appear to threaten us, but plague itself has never been eradicated. In this Very Short Introduction, Paul Slack explores the historical impact of plague over the centuries, looking at the ways in which it has been interpreted, and the powerful images it has left behind in art and literature. Examining what plague mean...
Opera
An interdisciplinary study of the interconnected subtexts of erotic attraction, illness, and death in several 19th- and 20th-century operatic texts. This is an examination of how opera uses the singing body to give voice to the suffering person. It presents medical and literary sources to make sense of the changing depiction of disease in opera.
