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An exploration of the use of drama as an intertext in the work of the 2nd century Latin author Apuleius, who wrote the only complete extant Latin novel, the Metamorphoses, in which a young man is turned into a donkey by magic. All Latin and Greek is translated into English.
The love story of Cupid and Psyche, the powerful god of love and a human girl, has fascinated readers for centuries, ever since it was written by the Roman author Apuleius in the second century AD. The enchanting story can be read as both the origin of many classic fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast or Cinderella, and as a philosophical portrait of the search of the human soul for the divine.
Regine Stokke began to blog about her day-to-day life shortly after she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia in 2008. Her stated purpose at the time was to give people a sense of what it was like to live with such a serious illness, and her blog became an almost instant classic. She writes openly about the emotional and physical aspects of her 15-month struggle to survive and explains how her disease impacts her life. In the course of her illness, Regine participated in photography exhibits, went to concerts, enjoyed her friends and family, and advocated for registering as a blood and bone marrow donor. She was a typical teenager with an incredible will to live, and the lessons that she learned have relevance for us all. Through her eyes, readers will discover a more vivid worldand a new appreciation for life, art, and the power of the human spirit.
This volume provides the first English translation of all the known correspondence to and from Søren Kierkegaard, including a number of his letters in draft form and papers pertaining to his life and death. These fascinating documents offer new access to the character and lifework of the gifted philosopher, theologian, and psychologist. Kierkegaard speaks often and openly about his desire to correspond, and the resulting desire to write for a greater audience. He consciously recognizes letter-writing as an opportunity to practice composition. Unlike most correspondence, Kierkegaard's letters expressly "do not require a reply"--he insists on this as a principle, while he clearly and earnestly yearns for a response to his efforts. Among his other principles are purposefulness, directness, and the equality of a letter to a visit with a friend (Kierkegaard preferred the former to the latter). Perhaps more than anything else in print, Kierkegaard's Letters and Documents reveal his love affair with the written word.
The Greek and Roman novels can be seen as an important transitional moment in the trajectory from performance to reading, from oralism to textuality, that has underpinned the history of discourse in European consciousness since the 5th century BC. In different and intriguing ways, they explore the contrast, tension, conflict, competition or dialogue between modes of discourse, which frame the novel's concern with identity and self-fashioning, as well as advertising innovation more generally.This volume brings together an international group of scholars interested in ancient and modern constructions of orality and writing and how they are reflected and manipulated in the ancient novel. The essays deal not only with questions of genre, oral poetics and traditions, but also with how various ways of pitting or collapsing modes of representation can become loaded articulations of wider world-views, of cultural, literary, epistemological anxieties and aspirations. The contributors focus in particular on issues surrounding theatricality, gender identity, rhetorical performance, epistolarity, monumentality and power in the ancient novel.
In recent years, scholars have extensively explored the function of the miraculous and wondrous in ancient narratives, mostly pondering on how ancient authors view wondrous accounts, i.e. the treatment of the descriptions of wondrous occurrences as true events or their use. More precisely, these narratives investigate whether the wondrous pursues a display of erudition or merely provides stylistic variety; sometimes, such narratives even represent the wish of the author to grant a “rational explanation” to extraordinary actions. At present, however, two aspects of the topic have not been fully examined: a) the ability of the wondrous/miraculous to set cognitive mechanisms in motion and b...
In ancient Rome, where literacy was limited and speech was the main medium used to communicate status and identity face-to-face in daily life, an education in rhetoric was a valuable form of cultural capital and a key signifier of elite male identity. To lose the ability to speak would have caused one to be viewed as no longer elite, no longer a man, and perhaps even no longer human. We see such a fantasy horror story played out in the Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, written by Roman North African author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros—the only novel in Latin to survive in its entirety from antiquity. In the novel’s first-person narrative as well as its famous inset tales ...
The Metamorphoses or Golden Ass of Apuleius (ca. 170 CE) is a Latin novel written by a native of Madauros in Roman North Africa, roughly equal to modern Tunisia together with parts of Libya and Algeria. Apuleius’ novel is based on the model of a lost Greek novel; it narrates the adventures of a Greek character with a Roman name who spends the bulk of the novel transformed into an animal, traveling from Greece to Rome only to end his adventures in the capital city of the empire as a priest of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Apuleius’ Florida and Apology deal more explicitly with the African provenance and character of their author while also demonstrating his complex interaction with Greek, Ro...
Despite the growing interest in Apuleius’ Apologia or Pro se de magia, a speech he delivered in AD 158/159 to defend himself against the charge of being a magus, the only comprehensive study on this speech and magic to date is that by Adam Abt (1908). The aim of this volume is to shed new light on the extent to which Apuleius’ speech reveals his own knowledge of magic, and on the implications of the dangerous allegations brought against Apuleius. By analysing the Apologia sequentially, the author does not only reassess Abt’s analysis but proposes a new reconstruction of the prosecution’s case, arguing that it is heavily distorted by Apuleius. Since ancient magic is the main topic of ...