In the first book to consider the study of world religion and world literature in concert, Zhange Ni proposes a new reading strategy that she calls "e;pagan criticism,"e; which she applies not only to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary texts that engage the global resurgence of religion but also to the very concepts of religion and the secular.
The most sophisticated and daring poetic ironist of the early Roman Empire, Publius Ovidius Naso, is perhaps best known for his oft-imitated Metamorphoses.
While many ancient Jewish and Christian leaders voiced opposition to Greek and Roman theater, this volume demonstrates that by the time the public performance of classical drama ceased at the end of antiquity the ideals of Jews and Christians had already been shaped by it in profound and lasting ways.
Kathleen Wall traces the myth through fifteen works of English, American, and Canadian literature, providing a fresh, feminist reading of these narratives.
The issue of the other has always been an urgent one, especially since 1980's, when the political debates over race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, and post-colonialism took the central stage.
Following Jesus to Burning Man: Recovering the Church's Vocation places the author, a Pentecostal/evangelical minister, in a thoroughly pagan context in the Nevada desert where he discovered the presence of God in a way that transformed his understanding of ministry in the twenty-first century context.
Fully illustrated collection of rare and previously unpublished tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, retold for a new generation by leading Arthurian expert, John Matthews, introduced by Sir John Boorman, director of the classic film, Excalibur, and illustrated with paintings and drawings by Tolkien artist, John Howe.
The essays in this collection explore various various models of representing temporality in ancient Greek and Roman literature to elucidate how structures of time communicate meaning, as well as the way that the cultural impact of measured time is reflected in ancient texts.
In the first century BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero, orator, statesman, and defender of republican values, created these philosophical treatises on such diverse topics as friendship, religion, death, fate and scientific inquiry.
Sicily and the strategies of empire in the poetic imagination of classical and medieval EuropeIn the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome's first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known to the Greeks as Persephone, by the god of the underworld.
Through a close and informative reading of seven key texts in Acts, Kauppi analyses the appearances of Graeco-Roman religion, offering evidence of practices including divination and oracles, ruler cult and civic foundation myth.
The role of human sacrifice in the ancient Mediterranean world and its implications continue to be topics that fire the popular imagination and engender scholarly discussion and controversy.
From a writer whom Charles Simic calls "e;one of the finest poets living"e; comes a collection of witty, compassionate, contemplative, and always surprising poems.
How the idea of the author was born in the battleground of genderWhen Sappho sang her songs, the only word that existed to describe a poet was a male oneaoidos, or ';singer-man.
Inspired by Rimbaud and Ashbery, the Slovenian poet Toma alamun is now inspiring the younger generation of American poetsand Woods and Chalices will secure his place in the ranks of influential, experimental twenty-first-century writers.