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Discusses the oral tradition as a theory of literary composition and its applications to Homeric and medieval epic.
Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able—and who in some instances thought themselves able—to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells. Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Sc...
This volume features an international group of experts on the literature, philosophy, and religion of the ancient Mediterranean world. Each paper makes a unique contribution, and together, the papers draw an engaging portrait of the idea of “repetition.”
In this volume, Silvia Luraghi offers a comprehensive account of construction variation with two-place verbs belonging to different sub-domains of experience (including bodily sensation, perception, cognition, emotion and volitionality) in the Homeric language.
Songs, pervasive sonic ephemeral acts that combine words and music, live in a contemporary world of commercialization as commodity. Flowing through our everyday lives as a given and oft-underacknowledged artifact to accompany our shopping, car trips, date nights, and gym days. Yet songs have a history as long as humanity and language. They hold a place, up until recently in our evolution, as an oral history library of the human species. Why then is there limited scholarship about how songs tell stories, and the ways in which those stories come together with sounds? And why is there a disconnect between songwriting as industrial practice and academic thought? A New Philosophy of Songwriting a...
“I love The First Christmas. What a charming way Stephen Mitchell has found to tell my favorite story of all, the Nativity, character by character (I love the donkey and the ox), with wise and thrilling interludes about God, reality, truth.” –Anne Lamott In The First Christmas, Stephen Mitchell brings the Nativity story to vivid life as never before. A narrative that is only sketched out in two Gospels becomes fully realized here with nuanced characters and a setting that reflects the culture of the time. Mitchell has suffused the birth of Jesus with a sense of beauty that will delight and astonish readers. In this version, we see the world through the eyes of a Whitmanesque ox and a v...
In Heroic Sagas and Ballads, Stephen A. Mitchell examines the world of the medieval Icelandic legendary sagas and their legacy in Scandinavia. Central to his argument is the view that these heroic texts should be studied in the light of the later Icelandic Middle Ages rather than that of the Viking age, although the stories, the tellers, and the audiences are clearly concerned with exactly this period of Scandinavian history. Viewing these sagas as the products of highly diverse forms of inspiration and creation—some oral, some written—Mitchell explores their aesthetic and social dimensions, demonstrating their function both as entertainment and as a literature with a more serious purpos...
There are more psychoanalytic theories today than anyone knows what to do with, and the heterogeneity and complexity of the entire body of psychoanalytic though have become staggering. In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, Stephen A. Mitchell weaves strands from the principal relational-model traditions (interpersonal psychoanalysis, British school object-relations theories, self psychology, and existential psychoanalysis) into a comprehensive approach to many of the knottiest problems and controversies in theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis. Mitchell’s earlier book, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, co-authored with Jay Greenberg, set the stage for this current integratio...
A widely celebrated translator's vivid, accessible, and elegantly concise rendering of an ancient English masterpiece Beowulf tells the story of a Scandinavian hero who defeats three evil creatures--a huge, cannibalistic ogre named Grendel, Grendel's monstrous mother, and a dragon--and then dies, mortally wounded during his last encounter. If the definition of a superhero is "someone who uses his special powers to fight evil," then Beowulf is our first English superhero story, and arguably our best. It is also a deeply pious poem, so bold in its reverence for a virtuous pagan past that it teeters on the edge of heresy. From beginning to end, we feel we are in the hands of a master storytelle...