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This book explores the ways in which music can engender religious experience, by virtue of its ability to evoke the ineffable and affect how the world is open to us. Arguing against approaches that limit the religious significance of music to an illustrative function, The Extravagance of Music sets out a more expansive and optimistic vision, which suggests that there is an ‘excess’ or ‘extravagance’ in both music and the divine that can open up revelatory and transformative possibilities. In Part I, David Brown argues that even in the absence of words, classical instrumental music can disclose something of the divine nature that allows us to speak of an experience analogous to contem...
In Christian faith, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of hopeful and expectant living. In art, the poetic interplay between past, present and future takes specific concrete forms, furnishing vital resources for sustaining an imaginative ecology of hope.This volume attends to the contributions that architecture, drama, literature, music and painting can make, as artists trace patterns of promise, resisting the finality of modernity's despairing visions and generating hopeful living in a present which, although marked by sin and death, is grasped imaginatively as already pregnant with future.
Drawing upon the pioneering work of the British theologian David Brown who argues for a non-static, ‘moving text’ that reaches beyond the biblical canon, this volume brings together twelve interdisciplinary essays, as well as a response from Brown. With essays ranging from New Testament textual criticism to the fiction of David Foster Wallace, The Moving Text provides an introduction to Brown and the Bible that will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as specialists in a wide range of fields. Contributions include: Ian Boxall (The Catholic University of America) "From the Magi to Pilate's Wife: David Brown, Tradition and the Reception of Matthew's Text," Robert MacSwain (The University of the South) "David Brown and Eleonore Stump on Biblical Interpretation," Aaron Rosen (Rocky Mountain College) "Revisions of Sacrifice: Abraham in Art and Interfaith Dialogue," Dennis F. Kinlaw III (Houston Baptist University) "The Forms of Faith in Contemporary American Fiction".
A long line of traditional, often conservative, criticism and cultural commentary deplored Byron as a slipshod poet. This pithy yet aptly poetic book, written by one of the world's foremost Romantic scholars, argues that assessment is badly mistaken. Byron's great subject is what he called 'Cant': the habit of abusing the world through misusing language. Setting up his poetry as a laboratory to investigate failures of writing, reading, and thinking, Byron delivered sharp critical judgment on the costs exacted by a careless approach to his Mother Tongue. Perspicuous readings of Byron alongside some of his Romantic contemporaries – Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley – reveal Byron's startling reconfiguration of poetry as a 'broken mirror' and shattered lamp. The paradoxical result was to argue that his age's contradictions, and his own, offered both ethical opportunities and a promise of poetic – broadly cultural – emancipation. This book represents a major contribution to ideas about Romanticism.
Why do many popular songs positively reference God if our culture is widely viewed as secular? Why is it a challenge to tell the Christian story when many say they are spiritual and believe in God? Why do we draw so much meaning from the popular songs we listen to? And might a deeper understanding of popular-music culture help us to explore the bigger stories we listen to throughout our lives, such as the Christian story? Primarily using Zygmunt Bauman’s understanding of “liquid modernity” we look at the social forces that shape Western society and consider why, while many are looking for “authentic,” ontologically based stories to understand their life experiences, historic provid...
Byron and Women [and men] is a compilation of new biographical and literary essays, examining the poet’s bisexuality and the ways in which it affected his poetry and drama. Areas covered are Byron and gender-studies (a general introduction); Byron’s Boyfriends (an aspect of his life which has traditionally been neglected); the Male Gaze in the Oriental Tales; homosexuality in Venice; Byron’s Nottinghamshire love-life; sex and gender in Don Juan; bisexuality in Byron and Shakespeare; and Byron’s heroines contrasted with those of Mozart. The volume has as appendices new editions of the notorious poems Don Leon and Leon to Annbella, with startling theories as to their authorship.
The Dardenne Brothers’ Cinematic Parables examines the work of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have been celebrated for their powerfully affecting social realist films. Though the Dardenne brothers’ films rarely mention religion or God, they have received wide recognition for their moral complexity and spiritual resonance. This book brings the Dardennes’ filmography into consideration with theological aesthetics, Christian ethics, phenomenological film theory, and continental philosophy. The author explores the brothers’ nine major films—beginning with The Promise (1996) and culminating in Young Ahmed (2019)—through the hermeneutics of philosopher Paul Ricoeu...
How do contemporary audiences engage with sacred music and what are its effects?
Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845 brings together a team of leading scholars to examine the interactions between history and literature in the Romantic period, focusing on practical as well as theoretical interconnections between the two genres and disciplines.
Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses assembles essays spanning the last thirty years, including a selection of Peter Larkin's original verse, with the concept of promise and loss serving as the uniting narrative thread.