The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Author: Rudolf Freiburg
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030834220

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture delves into the complex problems involved in all attempts to survive. The essays analyze survival in contemporary prose narratives, short stories, poems, dramas, and theoretical texts, but also in films and other modes of cultural practices. Addressing diverse topics such as memory and forgetting in Holocaust narratives, stories of refugees and asylum seekers, and representations of war, the ethical implications involved in survival in texts and media are brought into a transnational critical discussion. The volume will be of potential interest to a wide range of critics working on ethical issues, the body, and the politics of art and literature.

Visualizing Medieval Performance

Visualizing Medieval Performance
Author: Elina Gertsman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1351537369

Taking a fresh look at the interconnections between medieval images, texts, theater, and practices of viewing, reading and listening, this explicitly interdisciplinary volume explores various manifestations of performance and meanings of performativity in the Middle Ages. The contributors - from their various perspectives as scholars of art history, religion, history, literary studies, theater studies, music and dance - combine their resources to reassess the complexity of expressions and definitions of medieval performance in a variety of different media. Among the topics considered are interconnections between ritual and theater; dynamics of performative readings of illuminated manuscripts, buildings and sculptures; linguistic performances of identity; performative models of medieval spirituality; social and political spectacles encoded in ceremonies; junctures between spatial configurations of the medieval stage and mnemonic practices used for meditation; performances of late medieval music that raise questions about the issues of historicity, authenticity, and historical correctness in performance; and tensions inherent in the very notion of a medieval dance performance.

Spellcrash

Spellcrash
Author: Kelly McCullough
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2010-05-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101187751

Prepare for a total systems failure in this WebMage novel from Kelly McCullough. Ravirn—umpteenth great-grandson of one of the three Fates—is a talented sorcerer and a computer hacker extraordinaire in a world where magic has merged with 21st century technology. But even though he’s the best hacker around, there are some things that even he can’t fix. Necessity—the sentient computer that runs the multiverse—is still broken, and the only thing that can repair her is a massive reboot. But while Necessity is offline, anyone with enough power can attempt to seize control of the entire multiverse. As the time for the reboot draws near, four clear contenders emerge: Zeus, Hades, Fate, and Eris—all Gods from the Greek mythos who are more than a match for any man, even a demi-god like Ravirn. Now, in order to protect Necessity, Ravirn has to utilize all of his skills as a mage and fight to prevent complete chaos—even if it costs him his life...

Cobweb Bride

Cobweb Bride
Author: Vera Nazarian
Publisher: Norilana Books
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2013-07-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1607621541

Many are called... She alone can save the world and become Death's bride. COBWEB BRIDE (Cobweb Bride Trilogy, Book One) is a history-flavored fantasy novel with romantic elements of the Persephone myth, about Death's ultimatum to the world. What if you killed someone and then fell in love with them? In an alternate Renaissance world, somewhere in an imaginary "pocket" of Europe called the Kingdom of Lethe, Death comes, in the form of a grim Spaniard, to claim his Bride. Until she is found, in a single time-stopping moment all dying stops. There is no relief for the mortally wounded and the terminally ill.... Covered in white cobwebs of a thousand snow spiders she lies in the darkness... Her skin is cold as snow... Her eyes frozen... Her gaze, fiercely alive... While kings and emperors send expeditions to search for a suitable Bride for Death, armies of the undead wage an endless war... A black knight roams the forest at the command of his undead father... Spies and political treacheries abound at the imperial Silver Court.... Murdered lovers find themselves locked in the realm of the living... Look closer--through the cobweb filaments of her hair and along each strand shine stars... And one small village girl, Percy--an unwanted, ungainly middle daughter--is faced with the responsibility of granting her dying grandmother the desperate release she needs. As a result, Percy joins the crowds of other young women of the land in a desperate quest to Death's own mysterious holding in the deepest forests of the North... And everyone is trying to stop her. "... Nazarian writes clean and true prose ..." --Publishers Weekly "Fans of period fantasy and those who like stories that feel like fairy tales should appreciate this skillful novel by the twice Nebula Award-nominated author of Dreams of the Compass Rose and The Duke in His Castle." --Library Journal

R.S. Thomas

R.S. Thomas
Author: M. Wynn Thomas
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0708326617

The study places the work of a major religious poet of the late twentieth century in a number of striking new perspectives that allow him to be viewed for the first time as an 'alternative' war poet, a conscience-stricken pacifist, a jealously opportunistic student of art, and an experimental biographer of the modern soul. Published to mark the centenary of the ‘ogre of Wales’, this volume deals with the idées fixes that serially possessed the fiercely intense imagination of R. S. Thomas: Iago Prytherch, Wales, his family and, of course, a vexingly elusive deity. Here, these familiar obsessions are set in several unusual contexts that bring Thomas’s poetry into startling new relief. The war poetry is considered alongside the poet’s early relationship to the English topographical tradition; comparisons with Borges and Levertov underline the international dimensions of the poetry’s concerns; the intriguing ‘secret code’ of some of Thomas’s Welsh-language references is cracked; and his painting-poems (including several hitherto unpublished) are brought centre-stage from the peripheries to which they have been routinely relegated.

The Stone Virgins

The Stone Virgins
Author: Yvonne Vera
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2004-02-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1466806060

Winner of the Macmillan Prize for African Adult Fiction An uncompromising novel by one of Africa's premiere writers, detailing the horrors of civil war in luminous, haunting prose In 1980, after decades of guerilla war against colonial rule, Rhodesia earned its hard-fought-for independence from Britain. Less than two years thereafter when Mugabe rose to power in the new Zimbabwe, it signaled the begining of brutal civil unrest that would last nearly a half decade more. With The Stone Virgins Yvonne Vera examines the dissident movement from the perspective of two sisters living in a small township outside of Bulawayo. In a portrait painted in successive impressions of life before and after the liberation, Vera explores the quest for dignity and a centered existence against a backdrop of unimaginable violence; the twin instincts of survival and love; the rival pulls of township and city life; and mankind's capacity for terror, beauty, and sacrifice. One sister will find a reason for hope. One will not make it through alive. Weaving historical fact within a story of grand passions and striking endurance, Vera has gifted us with a powerful and provocative testament to the resilience of the Zimbabwean people.

To Labor Is To Pray

To Labor Is To Pray
Author: Mark Raney
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2013-01-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0615690939

A huge spawling Southern novel set mainly in Swansboro, and many other counties in North Carolina and Georgia. It covers several generations of commercial fishermen and farmers and shows how their contrast of labors serverd the South so well from the old time to the present.

Thug Criminology

Thug Criminology
Author: Adam Ellis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2023-06-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1487549210

Thug Criminology combines the urgent and as yet silenced voices of former gang/street-involved peoples turned academics, alongside their allies, in order to challenge and disrupt mainstream and academic knowledge about urban youth gangs specifically, and the "streets" more broadly. The book questions how the "streets" – and the racialized and marginalized urban communities who inhabit them – are researched, taught, and subsequently politicized. It looks at who gets to produce such knowledge, who benefits from such knowledge, and whose voices are privileged within dominant academic and public policy discourses. Drawing on decolonizing methodologies, the book seeks to give voice to scholars with lived experience of a "street" or gang life. Adam Ellis, Olga Marques, and Anthony Gunter reclaim the terms thug and gang to reconstruct the narrative around street-involved youth, seeing them not as criminals but rather as survivors of historical oppression and trauma. Challenging the colonial structure of criminology and other disciplines that focus on street crime, Thug Criminology aims to disrupt and disentangle the knowledge that has been produced on gangs and urban violence.

Freedom — Determinism Indeterminism

Freedom — Determinism Indeterminism
Author: Anatol von Spakovsky
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2013-12-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9401766029

The idea and the feeling of freedom play such a part in the life of man that he is ready to sacrifice in their name his own life and still more frequently that of his fellow-men. Man feels that he is really man only when he is able to realize himself indivi dually, socially and cosmically in a complete freedom, i. e. according to the inner bio-psychical depths of his own being without any constraint from the outer - social or cosmic - world. However, although people like very much, and often too much, to speak about freedom, its content and limits are so vague for most of them that everybody determines the content and limits of freedom according to his own tastes, dispositions and interests. Perhaps just because of this vagueness of the idea of freedom, this idea has such a great influence on man, giving a free play to his imagination. Therefore, it would be good to clarify the idea of freedom by analysing its different aspects in their connection with the general problem of determinism and indeterminism.