You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Moorings, the fourteenth collection from award-winning poet Christopher Levenson, is a profound meditation on loss and ageing. "It is an intricate business, growing old," posits the speaker in the titular poem. "Though I once had a photographic memory," the poet reminisces, "those negatives are lost, and will not develop." Time and old age make room for loss, but so does greed--"with time language disintegrates... lost to dementia ... speech taken over by corporate empires, unique ways of feeling lost...." Moving from memories of childhood and artistic tributes to frustrated critiques of capitalism balanced with doses of lighthearted wordplay, these poems celebrate the colour of life, yet are wary of the darkness that can be found inside and around us. Pulling from a wide range of experience and memories but always anchored in the particular and the familiar, the poems in Moorings confront ageing and death head-on, while also celebrating the spiritual sustenance of friendship and memories in our steadily changing world.
Revised Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Portugal, for the degree of Doctor of German Language and Literature, 2007.
Sylvia Plath, 1932-63. American poet and novelist, established her reputation by the courageous and controlled treatment of extreme and painful states of mind. The volume covers the period 1960-1985.
The literary legacies of World War II have been mixed and varied, especially in West Germany and Japan, where the burden of defeat has been expressed by novelists and intellectuals in strikingly different ways. Reflecting the cultural differences between the two nations, and the experiences of occupation and democratization that occurred after the war, the postwar literatures of Germany and Japan intimately reveal the hopes and aspirations, the dreams and the nightmares, of two peoples confronting the harsh realities of war. Using a comparative approach, Ambiguous Legacies explores the conditions and values under which the postwar literatures of West Germany and Japan were created. Specifica...
The Belgians in Ontario chronicles more than 300 years of Belgian presence in Ontario, beginning with Father Louis Hennepin, the Recollet missionary who accompanied La Salle on his explorations. This book examines the contributions of the Belgian community in a diverse range of activities including agriculture, sports, and the arts. Magee offers a detailed analysis of reasons and methods of immigration (including a study of the pioneering agricultural labourers who participated in the swallow migration). Of special interest to students of social and ethnic studies is the extensive survey of Belgian Canadians, reflecting their attitudes and experiences. Lavishly illustrated with more than 50 rare photographs culled from private and public collections, The Belgians in Ontario is a visually-interesting look at the many contributions of a determined people.
One of the outstanding editors of this century, John Lehmann founded New Writing and London Magazine as well as other literary journals. He also wrote poems, two novels and a distinguished literary autobiography. All aspects of Lehmann's work are discussed in this book of recollections and essays of friends, critics and other writers.
The book begins with a history of previous translations of Tang tales, surveying how Chinese scholarship has shaped the reception and rendition of these texts in the West. In that context, Tang Dynasty Tales offers the first annotated translations of six major tales (often called chuanqi, “transmitting the strange”) which are interpreted specifically for students and scholars interested in medieval Chinese literature. Following the model of intertextual readings that Glen Dudbridge introduced in his The Tale of Li Wa (Oxford, 1983), the annotation points to resonances with classical texts, while setting the tales in the political world of their time; the “Translator's Notes” that fol...
The need for heirs in any traditional society is a compelling one. In traditional China, where inheritance and notions of filiality depended on the production of progeny, the need was nearly absolute. As Ann Waltner makes clear in this broadly researched study of adoption in the late Ming and early Ch'ing periods, the getting of an heir was a complex, even paradoxical undertaking. Although adoption involving persons of the same surname was the only arrangement ritually and legally sanctioned in Chinese society, adoption of persons of a different surname was a relatively common practice. Using medical and ritual texts, legal codes, local gazetteers, biography, and fiction, Waltner examines the multiple dimensions of the practice of adoption and identifies not only the dominant ideology prohibiting adoption across surname lines, but also a parallel discourse justifying the practice.
Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies. Pike's readings of Louis Ferdinand Céline and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions at work in the modern appropriation of structures derived from ancient and medieval descents. His book shows how these structures were redefined in modernism and persist in contemporary critical practice. In order to recover the historical corpus...
None