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These essays chart the emergence of a new chapter in an ancient faith - the rise of social service and political activism in Buddhist Asia and the West. Engaged Buddhists have sought new ways to comfort society's oppressed communities.
Following their first gathering in Munster, Westphalia, the city of Ford's ancestors, Fordians present a multi-faceted image of this Anglo-German and Francophile English Modernist. International interest in the Hueffers' German background will be triggered by two articles on Franz Hueffer and the references to Munster and Westphalia in Ford's writings. Excursions in politics and poetry and Ford in context provide a framework for "Aspects of Parade's End", the edition and simultaneous translation of which into major European languages forms the most important project for the new Millennium.
Although Rasselas has received more critical commentary than almost any other work by Samuel Johnson, Edward Tomarken's book is the first full length study to focus on his tale of the Prince of Abyssinia. This anomaly arises, as Tomarken shows, because Rasselas has remained resistant to the customary critical approaches of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, consistently eliciting new kinds of insights and raising new sorts of problems. Tomarken' s contribution is a new methodology to explain this phenomenon. He sees Johnson's early writings, London and Irene, as instances of the writer trying with only partial success to achieve what he first realized in The Vanity of Human...
Traces the practice of induction - manipulating textual evidence by selective quotation - and its uses by Romantic-period writers.
A compelling case for the importance of the heart and emotions over that of critical theory in Johnson's literary criticism.
In The Reason of Church Government, a thirty-three-year-old John Milton writes of his hope that by labour and intent study... joyn'd with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die. Even the young Milton, committed as he was to achieving a place in the annals of poetic history, might have been surprised by the strenuous efforts in aftertimes to keep his legacy alive. The fifteen essays that comprise this collection focus, from varied perspectives, on Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and A Mask, poems that have attracted sustained critical attention. Several consider shorter poems, such as the Nativity Od...
Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geo...
Dead Masters examines the dual issues of mentoring and intertextuality as an integrated phenomenon. Through a series of fresh and novel readings of Johnsonian and Boswellian texts, the book further advances our awareness of the formal complexities of Johnson's writings and the psychological substratum from which they issue.
This Element examines the eighteenth-century novel's contributions to empirical knowledge. Realism has been the conventional framework for treating this subject within literary studies. This Element identifies the limitations of the realism framework for addressing the question of knowledge in the eighteenth-century novel. Moving beyond the familiar focus in the study of novelistic realism on problems of perception and representation, this Element focuses instead on how the eighteenth-century novel staged problems of inductive reasoning. It argues that we should understand the novel's contributions to empirical knowledge primarily in terms of what the novel offered as training ground for methods of reasoning, rather than what it offered in terms of formal innovations for representing knowledge. We learn from such a shift that the eighteenth-century novel was not a failed experiment in realism, or in representing things as they are, but a valuable system for reasoning and thought experiment.