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As anyone who has watched television in recent years can attest, we live in the age of Viagra. From Bob Dole to Mike Ditka to late-night comedians, our culture has been engaged in one long, frank, and very public talk about impotence—and our newfound pharmaceutical solutions. But as Angus McLaren shows us in Impotence, the first cultural history of the subject, the failure of men to rise to the occasion has been a recurrent topic since the dawn of human culture. Drawing on a dazzling range of sources from across centuries, McLaren demonstrates how male sexuality was constructed around the idea of potency, from times past when it was essential for the purpose of siring children, to today, w...
There is a prehistory of the adultery novel, which became a pan-European literary paradigm in the second half of the 19th century. In the wake of the French Revolution, secular marriage legislation emerges, producing a metaphorical surplus that is still effective today. Using legal history and canonical literary texts from Rousseau to Goethe and Manzoni to Hugo and Flaubert, this book traces how marriage around 1800 became a figure of reflection for the modern nation-state. In the process, original contributions to the philology of the individual texts emerge. At the same time, law and literature are made fruitful for a historical semantics of society and community. This book is a translation of an original German 1st edition “Ehe als Nationalfiktion” by Dagmar Stöferle, published by J.B. Metzler, imprint of Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). The author (with the support of Chris Owain Carter) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically.
In A Philosophy of the Unsayable, William Franke argues that the encounter with what exceeds speech has become the crucial philosophical issue of our time. He proposes an original philosophy pivoting on analysis of the limits of language. The book also offers readings of literary texts as poetically performing the philosophical principles it expounds. Franke engages with philosophical theologies and philosophies of religion in the debate over negative theology and shows how apophaticism infiltrates the thinking even of those who attempt to deny or delimit it. In six cohesive essays, Franke explores fundamental aspects of unsayability. In the first and third essays, his philosophical argument...
Knights at Court is a grand tour and survey of manners, manhood, and court life in the Middle Ages, like no other in print. Composed on an epic canvas, this authoritative work traces the development of court culture and its various manifestations from the latter years of the Holy Roman Empire (ca. A.D. 1000) to the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Leading medievalist and Renaissance scholar Aldo Scaglione offers a sweeping sociological view of three geographic areas that reveals a surprising continuity of courtly forms and motifs: German romances; the lyrical and narrative literature of northern and southern France; Italy's chivalric poetry. Scaglione discusses a...
First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The investigation of language, of how (and what and why) signifiers signify, is prominent in modern critical work, but the questions being asked are by no means new. In Mervelous Signals, Eugene Vance asserts that "there is scarcely a term, practice, or concept in contemporary theory that does not have some rich antecedent in medieval thought." He goes on to illustrate the complexity and depth of medieval speculations about language and literature. Vance's study of the link between the poetics and semiotics of the Middle Ages takes both a critical and a historical view as he brings today's insights to bear on the contemporary perspectives of such works as St. Augustine's Confessions, the Chanson de Roland, Chrätien's Yvain, Aucassin and Nicolette, Spenser's The Faerie Queen, and certain aspects of the works of Dante and Chaucer and of French medieval theater.
Library has Vol. 1-5.
The eighteenth century in New Spain witnessed major changes: among these, one of the most significant was the adoption of French customs among the upper groups of society in response to the spreading ideas of the Enlightenment. In addition, New Spain's economy and culture were also changing radically. The spread of these French-inspired ideas and customs soon reached the rest of urban society. These new ideas, it has been assumed, brought a relaxation of social customs. But Viqueira Alban takes this assumption, and raises the question: Was it really a period of relaxation of social customs, in this age of "growth without development?" He discovered that the movement of rural workers and thei...
An encounter between Frankes philosophy of the unsayable and Eastern apophatic wisdom in the domains of poetry, thought, and culture. In Apophatic Paths from Europe to China, William Franke brings his original philosophy of the unsayable, previously developed from Western sources such as ancient Neoplatonism, medieval mysticism, and postmodern negative theology, into dialogue with Eastern traditions of thought. In particular, he compares the Daoist Way of Chinese wisdom with Western apophatic thought that likewise pivots on recognizing the nonexistent, the unthinkable, and the unsayable. Leveraging François Julliens exegesis of the Chinese classics challenge to rethink the very basis ...
This comprehensive volume brings together an impressive array of Christian writers to examine sexuality, marriage, and family from the perspective of scripture, ancient Christian writers, Christian history, the official teachings of the Catholic Church, and contemporary theological reflection. As useful as it is profound, Sexuality, Marriage, and Family offers an in-depth exploration of the moral and ethical considerations surrounding issues such as sexuality, divorce, remarriage, conception, and sexual equality. It is an invaluable resource for college-level courses on marriage, parish-based marriage preparation courses, and the general reader who wishes to explore the issues, debates, and development of the Catholic tradition on sex, marriage, and family.