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The missionary journeys of the Apostle Paul changed the course of history. Paul returned for one more life as the great mystic and miracle-worker Saint Hilarion. Hilarion also cast out devils, healed the sick, raised the dead.
The humour of Tristram Shandy has often been acknowledged, but it is not easy to find scholarly articles on Laurence Sterne which suggest that their authors laughed as they wrote. Nine authors have been invited to redress this in the year of the tercentenary of Sterne’s birth. This volume offers nine different facets of humour, a kaleidoscope which enables readers to recombine at will the genial, the bawdy, the sentimental, the ludicrous, the hobby-horsical, the philosophical, the irreverent, the incongruous and the facetious, sending the text spiralling out of the page.
Pater Hilarion exists, but he is not time-bound. Hilarion would be comfortable with Basho or Merton, with Gandhi or Thoreau. He is a healthy "animus." Author Gary Young writes: "I am not sure who his biographer is, but I do have an occasional visitor, who joins me in solitude and who furnishes me with glimpses of a superior Christian, whose contemplative spirit bears fruit in common sense." Despite some unfamiliar monastic allusions, these stories should appeal to the simplest reader. If they did not, then Hilarion might be guilty of the usual religiosity. Instead, Hilarion shows that wisdom has a sense of humor.
The Greatest French Classics Of All Time serves as a literary voyage through the rich landscape of French literature, encapsulating the vibrancy and diversity of its canon. From the piercing introspection of Proust to the adventurous realms of Verne, this anthology curates an essential compendium of works that have shaped not only national but global thought and imagination. Each piece is a testament to the multifaceted nature of human experience, woven through a spectrum of genres that include tragedy, comedy, realism, and romance. The anthology stands out for its inclusion of seminal works that have sparked literary movements, challenged societal norms, and transcended the confines of thei...
In her study of newly recovered works by British women, Kathryn Freeman traces the literary relationship between women writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, otherwise known as the Orientalists. Distinct from their male counterparts of the Romantic period, who tended to mirror the Orientalist distortions of India, women writers like Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Sydney Owenson, Mariana Starke, Eliza Fay, Anna Jones, and Maria Jane Jewsbury interrogated these distortions from the foundation of gender. Freeman takes a three-pronged approach, arguing first that in spite of their marked differences, female authors shared a common resistance to the Orientalists’ intellectual genealogy t...
Essays about ruination, resilience, reading, and religion generated by a reflection on a fourth-century hagiography. In Jerome’s Life of Saint Hilarion, a fourth-century saint briefly encounters the ruins of an earthquake-toppled city and a haunted garden in Cyprus. From these two fragmentary passages, Virginia Burrus delivers a series of sweeping meditations on our experience of place and the more-than-human worlds—the earth and its gods—that surround us. Moving between the personal and geological, Earthquakes and Gardens ruminates on destruction and resilience, ruination and resurgence, grief and consolation in times of disaster and loss. Ultimately, Burrus’s close readings reimagine religion as a practice that unsettles certainty and develops mutual flourishing.
At a time of renewed interest in Empire, this stimulating volume explores the complex relationship between the Bible and the colonial enterprise, and examines some overlooked aspects of this relationship. These include unconventional retellings of the gospel story of Jesus by Thomas Jefferson and Raja Rammohun Roy; the fate of biblical texts when marshalled by Victorian preachers to strengthen British imperial intentions after the India uprising of 1857; the cultural-political use of the Christian Old Testament, first by the invaders to attack temple practices and rituals, then by the invaded to endorse the temple heritage scorned by missionaries; the dissident hermeneutics of James Long and William Colenso confronting and compromising with colonial ambitions; and finally the subtly seditious deployment of biblical citations in two colonial novels. This innovative book offers both practical and theoretical insights and provides compelling evidence of the continuing importance of postcolonial discourse for biblical studies.
In Jerome of Stridon and the Ethics of Literary Production in Late Antiquity Thomas E. Hunt argues that Jerome developed a consistent theology of language and the human body that inflected all of his writing projects. In doing so, the book challenges and recasts the way that this important figure in Late Antiquity has been understood. This study maps the first seven years of Jerome’s time in Bethlehem (386–393). Treating his commentaries on Paul, his hagiography, his controversy with Jovinian, his correspondence with Augustine, and his translation of Hebrew, the book shows Jerome to be immersed in the exciting and dangerous currents moving through late antique Christianity.
Marian Smith recaptures a rich period in French musical theater when ballet and opera were intimately connected. Focusing on the age of Giselle at the Paris Opéra (from the 1830s through the 1840s), Smith offers an unprecedented look at the structural and thematic relationship between the two genres. She argues that a deeper understanding of both ballet and opera--and of nineteenth-century theater-going culture in general--may be gained by examining them within the same framework instead of following the usual practice of telling their histories separately. This handsomely illustrated book ultimately provides a new portrait of the Opéra during a period long celebrated for its box-office su...