Books on the topic 'Derived literacy'

To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Derived literacy.

Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles

Select a source type:

Consult the top 46 books for your research on the topic 'Derived literacy.'

Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.

You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.

Browse books on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.

1

D, Key Jack, ed. Medicine, literature & eponyms: An encyclopedia of medical eponyms derived from literary characters. Malabar, Fla: R.E. Krieger Pub. Co., 1989.

Find full text
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
2

Pacheco, Marcelo E., contributor of text and Fundación Pettoruti, eds. Emilio Pettoruti y Enrique E. García: Deriva de una amistad. Buenos Aires: Fundación Pettoruti, 2018.

Find full text
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
3

1904-, Fadiman Clifton, ed. The mathematical magpie: Being more stories, mainly transcendental, plus subsets of essays, rhymes, music, anecdotes, epigrams, and other pime oddments and diversions, rational or irrational, all derived from the infinite domain of mathematics. New York: Copernicus, 1997.

Find full text
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
4

Medicine, Literature, and Eponyms: Encyclopedia of Medical Eponyms Derived from Literary Characters. 2nd ed. Krieger Pub Co, 1989.

Find full text
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
5

Everhart, Nancy. Evaluating the School Library Media Center. Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798400648205.

Full text
Abstract:
Everhart provides practical guidelines and ready-to-use forms for evaluating a school library media center, as well as important results derived in other studies. She includes qualitative and quantitative techniques for the areas of curriculum, personnel, facilities, collections, usage, and technology. She also gives step-by-step instructions on how to create in-house surveys, conduct interviews, and use observation to gather useful data. Conduct research, collect statistics, and evaluate your program with this useful resource. Everhart provides practical guidelines and ready-to-use forms for evaluating a school library media center, as well as important results derived in other studies. She includes qualitative and quantitative techniques for the areas of curriculum, personnel, facilities, collections, usage, and technology. She also gives step-by-step instructions on how to create in-house surveys, conduct interviews, and use observation to gather useful data. For example, there are directions on how to assess information literacy with rubrics. In addition, each chapter gives detailed references, a list of further readings, applicable Web sites, and dissertations. A quick and easy guide to justifying and supporting your SLMC operations and effectiveness, this book is invaluable to all school library media specialists. It will also be of interest to school library media supervisors and researchers.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
6

White, Eryn. Protestant Dissent in Wales. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198702245.003.0009.

Full text
Abstract:
Wales was once perceived as a ‘nation of Nonconformists’, but immediately after the Glorious Revolution, Dissenters represented a tiny minority of the Welsh population. One of the roots of later Dissenting success can be found in the disproportionate contribution that Welsh Dissenters made to Welsh-language print culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In addition, the growth of a ‘circulating’ school system helped spread literacy (and the Word) to the younger generation. Although begun by Griffith Jones, rector of Llanddowror, the episcopal hierarchy remained sceptical of movements that crossed parish boundaries. This was also true of Methodism. The impact of revival in Wales was considerable. Initially, much of the support was derived from Methodists, although Calvinistic Methodism was initially much stronger than Wesleyan Methodism in the country—it was only in the early nineteenth century that Wesleyan Methodism began to enjoy more success.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
7

Stohr, Karen. The Etiquette of Eating. Edited by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199372263.013.29.

Full text
Abstract:
This chapter explores and defends the idea that the etiquette conventions governing dinner parties, whether formal or informal, have moral significance. Their significance derives from the way that they foster and facilitate shared moral aims. I draw on literary and philosophical sources to make this claim, beginning with Isak Dineson’s short story, “Babette’s Feast.” I employ the concept of ritual from Confucius and Xunzi, as well as Immanuel Kant’s detailed discussion of dinner parties in the Anthropology. Kant’s account, in particular, helps illuminate how properly conducted dinners can enhance our understanding and promote moral community among the people who attend. I conclude that dinner parties play an important role in the moral life, and that the etiquette conventions governing them derive their binding force from their contribution to that role.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
8

Cave, Terence, and Deirdre Wilson, eds. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794776.003.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
After initial remarks on the relations between literature, language, and communication, the Introduction outlines the main assumptions of relevance theory, explaining the distinctions between coded and ‘ostensive’ communication, between ‘meaning’ and ‘import’, and between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. It considers the role of relevance and inference in comprehension; discusses how implicatures are derived in context and why words are not always used to convey their literal meanings; reflects on the nature of metaphor and irony, and examines the relation between processing effort, rhetoric, and style. It then turns to ways in which a relevance theory approach might question the tenets of modern literary theory (the ‘death of the author’, scepticism about intentions), to issues of historical and contextual interpretation, and to the notion of ‘intertextuality’. Finally, it reviews a range of evidence widely taken to support an ‘embodied’ conception of cognition, language, and communication which seems particularly well-adapted to literary studies.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
9

Evangelista, Stefano. Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864240.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
Derived from the ancient Greek for ‘world citizenship’, cosmopolitanism offers a radical alternative to identities and cultural practices built on the idea of the nation: cosmopolitans imagine themselves instead as part of a global community that cuts across national and linguistic boundaries. This book argues that fin-de-siècle writing in English witnessed an extensive and heated debate about cosmopolitanism, which transformed readers’ attitudes towards national identity, foreign literatures, translation, and the idea of world literature. It offers a critical examination of cosmopolitanism as a field of controversy. While some writers and readers embraced the creative, imaginative, emotional, and political potentials of world citizenship, hostile critics denounced it as a politically and morally suspect ideal, and stressed instead the responsibilities of literature towards the nation. In this age of empire and rising nationalism, world citizenship came to enshrine a paradox: it simultaneously connoted positions of privilege and marginality, connectivity and non-belonging. Chapters on Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, George Egerton, the periodical press, and artificial languages bring to light a variety of literary responses. The book interrogates cosmopolitanism as a liberal ideology that celebrates human diversity and as a social identity linked to worldliness. It investigates its effect on gender, ethics, and the emotions. It presents English-language literature of the fin de siècle as a dynamic space of exchange and mediation, and argues that our own approach to literary studies should become less national in focus.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
10

Mune, Christina D. Libraries Supporting Online Learning. ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798400678929.

Full text
Abstract:
Using practical examples from librarians in the field, this book lays out current issues in online learning and teaches librarians how to adapt a variety of library services―including instruction, reference, and collection development―to online education. Recent studies highlighting the challenges faced by online learners show that skills librarians are uniquely qualified to teach, such as information and digital literacy and source evaluation, can improve academic performance in online courses and enhance the online learning experience. Just as embedded librarianship was developed to answer the needs of online courses when they emerged in the early 2000s, online learning librarian Christina Mune now teaches "online librarianship" as a set of realistic strategies for serving a variety of online education models. Each chapter of Libraries Supporting Online Learning addresses a different strategy for supporting online students and/or faculty, with all strategies derived from real-world practices. Librarians will find information on best practices for creating digital literacy tutorials and dynamic content, providing patrons with open access and open educational resources, helping patrons to avoid copyright issues, promoting peer-to-peer learning and resource sharing, posting to social media, and developing scalable reference services. The tools and practical examples in this book will be useful for all educators interested in increasing the efficacy of online learning. Offers practical strategies to librarians responsible for supporting hybrid and online courses and degree programs as well as MOOCs May be easily adopted as a library science textbook for those teaching instructional design, instructional technology, distance librarianship, or academic library issues courses Includes case studies on assessment information and grant writing for administrators and library advocates Informs all educators interested in increasing the efficacy of online leaning in higher education Is suitable for inclusion in academic collections supporting library and information science
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
11

Mendoza, Barbara. Artifacts from Ancient Egypt. An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798400614781.

Full text
Abstract:
Primary source documents and detailed entries reveal what ancient Egypt was like, using the objects and artifacts of daily life from the period covering the Predynastic era through the Græco-Roman period (5000 BCE to 300 CE). Historians have found that valuable knowledge about long-ago civilizations can be derived from examining the simple routines of daily life. This fascinating study presents a collection of everyday objects and artifacts from ancient Egypt, shedding light on the social life and culture of ancient Egyptians. The work starts with a popular notion of ancient Egyptian beauty and gradually moves on to address various aspects of life, including home, work, communication, and transition and afterlife. Organized by topics, the work contains the following sections: beauty, adornment, and clothing; household items, furniture, and games; food and drink; tools and weapons; literacy and writing; death and funerary equipment; and religion, ritual, and magic. Each object holds equal importance and dates from the Predynastic era to the Græco-Roman period of ancient Egypt (5000 BCE to 300 CE). A special section provides guidance on evaluating objects and artifacts by asking questions—Who created it? Who used it? What did it do/what was its purpose? When and where was it made? Why was it made?—to help assess the historical context of the object.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
12

Beeston, Alix. Torn, Burned, and Yet Dancing. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190690168.003.0005.

Full text
Abstract:
This chapter discusses the collaborative and institutionalized mode of production in studio-era Hollywood through the lens of the two major projects that comprised the work of the final year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life: the screenplay “Cosmopolitan” and the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. These texts modify the modernist literary trope of the woman-in-series in concert with classical Hollywood’s defining logic of substitution and repetition. Ultimately derived from the basic seriality of the photogrammatic track, this logic is incarnated by female characters in “Cosmopolitan” and The Last Tycoon who, in refusing to remain silent substitutes for other women, rupture the illusory conceits of seamless fictional narration in classical Hollywood—and its equally seamless discourse of femininity. Fitzgerald’s Hollywood writing thus confronts the gendered and racialized limits of the modernist literary field and, in the process, unravels the myth of the solitary author and the singular, stable literary text.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
13

Stone, Martin Jay. There’s No Such Thing as Interpreting a Text. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190456368.003.0005.

Full text
Abstract:
Positively, this chapter sets out various structural differences between literary and legal interpretation. Negatively, it criticizes views of legal and literary interpretation that attempt to derive their features from an account of interpretation-in-general. The thesis that a successful interpretation always recovers an author’s intention is specifically rejected. A “naïve” view of interpretation is defended—the one that appears when we are sunk in practical activity—as opposed to theories of interpretation (e.g., “postmodern” ones) that tend to picture it as ubiquitous and endless.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
14

Jockers, Matthew L. Evidence. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037528.003.0002.

Full text
Abstract:
This chapter discusses new approaches and new methodologies in literary evidence gathering. Science derives conclusions based on evidence, and ideally, is open to new methodologies. Furthermore, science attempts to be exhaustive in the gathering of evidence as much as possible and must therefore welcome new modes of exploration, discovery, and analysis. This chapter emphasizes literary criticism's heavy reliance on associations as evidence and explains how literary studies differs from scientific experimentation. It also considers the advantages of “close reading,” the primary methodology used in the study of literature, and proceeds by looking at the ways that big data—the equivalent to digital libraries in literary studies—is changing the way data sampling is being undertaken. Finally, it describes how new methods of analysis allow us to extract new forms of evidence from the digital library.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
15

Reese, Ruth Anne. 2 Peter and Jude. William B. Eerdmans, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/bci-001c.

Full text
Abstract:
In this volume Ruth Anne Reese explores the theological and literary meaning of 2 Peter and Jude with an emphasis on theology for the church today. She seeks to meld together the best tools derived from the disciplines of both biblical studies and theology. Reese's 2 Peter and Jude begins with a general introduction to the two books and proceeds to look at each text, exploring the meaning of particular words and illuminating the text with elements of history, sociology, and literary study. The themes of each book -- and how they are played out throughout the biblical canon -- are examined from an explicitly theological angle. Reese brings together insights from the best of biblical scholarship with the work of theologians, both contemporary and ancient. The combination of disciplines leads to new insights on such issues as judgment, community living, and the relationship between faith and ethics.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
16

Lawrence, Jeffrey. An Inter-American Episode. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190690205.003.0003.

Full text
Abstract:
This chapter focuses on a paradigmatic misencounter between an American experiencer and a Latin American reader. Examining an implicit debate about the sources of Walt Whitman’s poetry and vision of the Americas, I argue that Waldo Frank, one of the twentieth century’s main literary ambassadors from the US to Latin America, positioned Whitman as the representative US writer whose antibookish experiential aesthetics could serve as a model for “American” writers both in the North and in the South. I show how Frank’s framework provided a foil for Borges’s idiosyncratic view that Whitman’s poetry about America derived entirely from his readings of European and US writers. Although much of the best scholarship on Whitman’s reception in Latin America has concentrated on poets like José Martí and Pablo Neruda, who adapted Whitman’s naturalism, I contend that Borges’s iconoclastic portrait of Whitman as a reader profoundly influenced a range of anti-experiential literary theories and practices in Latin America.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
17

Auerswald, Philip E., and Lokesh M. Dani. Economic Ecosystems. Edited by Gordon L. Clark, Maryann P. Feldman, Meric S. Gertler, and Dariusz Wójcik. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198755609.013.47.

Full text
Abstract:
In this chapter the concept of ecosystems as applied to economic geography is reviewed. It is argued that economic systems taking the metaphor of the ecosystem more literally than has been done in the past may advance understanding of economic systems at the regional scale are, literally, ecosystems. An ecosystem is defined as a dynamically stable network of interconnected firms and institutions within bounded geographical space. It is proposed that representing regional economic networks as ‘ecosystems’ provides analytical structure and depth to theories of the sources of regional advantage, the role of entrepreneurs in regional development, and the determinants of resilience in regional economic systems. The chapter frames regional economic change in terms of ecosystem dynamics, with reference to ecologically derived concepts of succession, speciation, diversity, resilience, and adaptation.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
18

Knox, Philip. The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192847171.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
This book examines the place of the French love allegory the Romance of the Rose in fourteenth-century English literary culture. The Rose had a transformative effect on the multilingual literary culture of fourteenth-century England, leaving more material evidence for late medieval English-speaking readers than any other vernacular literary work from mainland Europe. In an ongoing series of encounters both within and beyond the territorial boundaries of Britain, continuously reshaped by new ideas and attitudes from across fourteenth-century Europe, the Rose in England became a cultural artefact of huge significance for a wide range of readers—men and women, clerics and laypeople, those at the centre and those on the fringes of the aristocratic courts. The central assertion of this book is that by tracing the radically plural afterlife of the Rose as it moves through a series of distinct but related cultural spheres in fourteenth-century England, it is possible to reveal the poem’s decisive importance in shaping the terms in which literary value was produced and contested. The book examines three different but related spheres of literary culture: aristocratic reading communities, Latinate philosophical poetry, and ideas about poetry and the role of the poet derived from classical literature. In each of these areas, the Rose is revealed to be both a generative and a disruptive text for the English poets who followed in its wake, making possible the newly ambitious writing that emerged in the generation that included Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, and the Gawain-poet.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
19

Boozer, Jack. The Intratextuality of Film Adaptation. Edited by Thomas Leitch. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199331000.013.11.

Full text
Abstract:
By observing the authorial intentions on the part of the novelist and the adapted film’s producer, screenwriter, director, and cast, Chapter 11 examines the intratextual process at work in the transformation of Philip Roth’s novella The Dying Animal to the big screen as Elegy. The notion of serial authorship can capture the creative interaction of intentions characteristic of the multi-source nature of film adaptation, whose products serve two texts: the source literary work and the screenplay derived from it. The essay considers the hints of Roth’s personal views and autobiography implied through his narrator, David Kepesh, and this character’s relationships with women, as well as through the implied author’s own position as a writer—a self-conscious status the film does not engage.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
20

Manzini, Francesco. Frenetic Romanticism. Edited by Paul Hamilton. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696383.013.8.

Full text
Abstract:
Frenetic Romanticism developed as a specifically French hybrid form, tracing its lineage back to Bandello and Rosset, via such eighteenth-century intermediaries as Jacques Cazotte—the author ofLe Diable amoureux(1772), traditionally regarded as the first important example of theconte fantastique. However, it also derived from the more recent literary and historical models variously provided by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sade, German Romanticism in its many forms, the English, Scottish, and Irish Gothic novel, Byron, Polidori, the Shelleys, and the French Revolutionaries, particularly the Jacobins. Frenetic Romanticism in all its various forms produces what Artaud refers to as a psychic phosphorescence that serves to break down psychic barriers. This made (and continues to make) Frenetic Romanticism appear profound and liberating to some, but extravagant and ephemeral to others.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
21

Schaberg, David. Classics (jing經). Edited by Wiebke Denecke, Wai-Yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199356591.013.12.

Full text
Abstract:
Each of the texts and commentarial traditions known as the “Confucian” classics derives ultimately from Zhou dynasty models for speech and ritual behavior. Shijing (Classic of Poetry) includes both court liturgy and local popular song, Shangshu (Documents Classic) gathers speeches attributed to early rulers, Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Anna ls) assembles historical accounts and interpretations, the Classics on ritual (li) addresses fine points of ceremony and political order, and Yijing (Classic of Changes) offers a guide to divination and the connections between the natural and human worlds. Conceived of as a set and linked over time to the teachings of Confucius, the canon was adopted during the Han dynasty as the prime expression of China’s ideals for morality, education, administrative practice, and governance. As a rich literary corpus that had implicit legitimacy, the classics offered models both for particular literary styles and for an enduring order of textual expression and interpretation.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
22

Lepore, Ernie, and Matthew Stone. Explicit Indirection. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198738831.003.0007.

Full text
Abstract:
Our goal in this chapter is to contest the traditional view of indirection in utterances such as, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ by developing a very different way of characterizing the interpretations involved. We argue that the felt “indirection” of such utterances reflects the kind of meaning the utterances have, rather than the way that meaning is derived. So understood, there is no presumption that indirect meanings involve the pragmatic derivation of enriched contents froma literal interpretation; rather, we argue that indirect meanings are explicitly encoded in grammar. We build on recent work on formalizing declarative, interrogative, and imperative meanings as distinct but compatible kinds of content for utterances.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
23

Klein, Julie Thompson, and Robert Frodeman. Interdisciplining Humanities. Edited by Robert Frodeman. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198733522.013.13.

Full text
Abstract:
This chapter surveys the predisciplinary past and more recent inter- and trans-disciplinary developments in humanities. After presenting a snapshot of two disciplines—art history and music studies—it outlines the trajectories of two traditionally text-based disciplines, philosophy and literary studies. While the English word “humanities” derives from a cultural development beginning in ancient Rome, the formation of the modern disciplines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a watershed in this history. Counter-traditions of general and holistic knowledge persisted, but specialization in segmented discipline-based domains increasingly shaped the contours of humanities education and research—to the detriment of older, transdisciplinary elements. Over the course of the twentieth century, a number of developments fostered interactions across the disciplines, extending from the importation of European philosophy and literary studies to postcolonial critique. Today new interdisciplinary fields appear as well as fresh efforts at transdisciplinary cultural and epistemological transformations.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
24

Perry, Jonathan S. Collegia and their Impact on the Constitutional Structure of the Roman State. Edited by Paul J. du Plessis, Clifford Ando, and Kaius Tuori. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198728689.013.11.

Full text
Abstract:
Focusing on a few key passages, derived principally from law codes and literary sources, this chapter sketches out the legal situation of collegia vis-à-vis “the state”. However, this material is weighed against the rich epigraphic evidence (i.e. inscribed documents) that suggests the widespread and, in practical effect, unrestricted nature of Roman associations. It suggests that the appearance of governmental interference and regulation, from the late Republic throughout the Principate, was itself merely a pretext, as the government continued to encourage the development and proliferation of collegia as a means of social and political control. It questions whether the senate and the emperors had an interest in actually regulating and licencing collegial assembly, and whether legal texts can be reconciled with the inscriptional material attesting extensive collegial organisation, particularly in Italy and the Empire’s western provinces.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
25

Lawrence, Jeffrey. Anxieties of Experience. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190690205.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
26

Dean, Andrew. Metafiction and the Postwar Novel. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198871408.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
This book examines the origins, poetics, and capacities of self-reflexive fiction across the globe after World War II. Focusing on three authors’ careers—J. M. Coetzee, Janet Frame, and Philip Roth—it seeks to circumvent the large-scale theoretical paradigms (such as ‘postmodernism’) that have long been deployed to describe this writing. The book does so by developing new terms for discussing the intimacies of metafictional writing, derived from the writing of Miguel de Cervantes and J. L. Borges. The ‘self of writing’ refers to the figure of the author that a writer may imagine exists independently from discourse. The ‘public author as signature’ represents the public understandings of an author that emerge from biography and the author’s corpus itself. The book shows how these figures of authorship are handled by authors, as they draw on the materials offered by their own corpora and communities of readers. Sometimes, this book shows, authors invent distinctively literary ways of adjudicating enduring political debates: the responsibility of a novelist to the political aspirations of a community, the ability of the novel to pursue justice on behalf of others, and the public good that literature serves. Yet this is not a story of unmitigated success: the book also demonstrates how metafiction can be used as a way to close down interpretive schemes and to avoid contributing to public value. Through a close focus on literary environments, the book ultimately gives a finer-grained account of the history of postwar metafiction, and offers new ways of theorizing the relationship between fiction, life-writing, and literary institutions.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
27

Meyer, Abbye E. From Wallflowers to Bulletproof Families. University Press of Mississippi, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496837561.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
With play and complication between adolescence and disability, young adult disability narratives demonstrate their inherent political and literary possibilities; the power that disability-centered readings offer young adult literature evolves through five types of representation: as the voice of adolescence itself, as a literary metaphor, as a catalyst for growth, as a politicized identity, and as a powerful, familial identity. Marked by traumatic events and language, adolescent narrators display unmistakable symptoms of mental illness, which can be traced back to Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Plath’s The Bell Jar. Following analyses examine representations of disability in young adult literature—and more importantly, the ways that young adult narratives are able to expose these tropes and explicitly challenge the harmful messages they reinforce. Traditionally, two-dimensional characters allow literary metaphors to work, while forcing texts to ignore reality and reinforce harmful assumptions; when metaphors combine adolescence with disability, their complexity enables radical retellings of familiar stories. In young adult narratives, freak characters—marked as disabled, which are generally used for the self-realization and self-congratulation of others—are able to push boundaries, experiment with identities, and at times, destroy them. Further, the derided genre of problem novels become texts that empower disabled characters and introduce the goals of disability-rights movements. Ultimately, these analyses include narratives in other, digital media, which are able combine elements of literary criticism, narrative expression, disability theory, and political activism to create and represent the powerful solidarity of family-like communities.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
28

Garrard, Greg. Introduction. Edited by Greg Garrard. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199742929.013.035.

Full text
Abstract:
Ecocriticism began as an environmentalist literary movement that challenged Marxists and New Historicists over the meaning and significance of British Romanticism. An important component of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism has been characterized using the metaphor of waves. “First-wave” ecocriticism is inclined to celebrate nature rather than query “nature” as a concept and to derive inspiration as directly as possible from wilderness preservation and environmentalist movements. “Second-wave” ecocriticism is linked to social ecological movements and maintains a more skeptical relationship with the natural sciences. The contributions to the book, which encompass both “waves”, are organized in a widening spiral, from critical historicizations of “nature” in predominantly Euro-American literature in the first section to a series of surveys of work in ecocriticism’s “emerging markets” – Japan, China, India and Germany – in the last. The “Theory” section includes essays adopting perspectives from Latourian science studies, queer theory, deconstruction, animal studies, ecofeminism and postcolonialism. The “Genre” section demonstrates the diverse applications of ecocriticism with topics ranging from British literary fiction, Old Time music, environmental humour, climate change nonfiction.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
29

Lawrence, Jeffrey. Full Immersion. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190690205.003.0005.

Full text
Abstract:
This chapter explores how the modernist fiction of Katherine Anne Porter and Ernest Hemingway articulated a link between good writing and expansive personal experience, especially in their works set in Latin America. I begin by reconstructing their development of the literature of experience during the 1920s as an internationalist mode of expanding their knowledge of the world. My second section tracks how, amid the rise of the literary left and Popular Front aesthetics in the 1930s, Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937) and Porter’s “Hacienda” (1937) warned against producing literature derived from ideological positioning as opposed to first-hand eyewitnessing. I close by demonstrating the surprising interest in authorial experience among New Critics such as Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, who “disciplined” the literature of experience by re-envisioning place-based absorption as a matter of formal style, thus setting the tone for debates about authorial experience in the early post-1945 period.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
30

Predelli, Stefano. Fictional Discourse. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
This book defends a Radical Fictionalist Semantics for fictional discourse. Focusing on proper names as prototypical devices of reference, it argues that fictional names are only fictionally proper names, and that, as a result, fictional sentences do not encode propositions. According to Radical Fictionalism, the contentful outcomes achieved by fiction are derived from the outcomes of so-called impartation, that is, from the effects achieved by the use of language. As a result, Radical Fictionalism pays special attention to fictional telling and to related themes in narrative fiction. In particular, the book proposes a Radical Fictionalist approach to the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic fiction, and to the divide between storyworlds and narrative peripheries. These ideas are then applied to the discussion of classic themes in the philosophy of fiction, including narrative time, literary translation, storyworld importation, fictional languages, inconsistent fictions, nested narratives, and narrative closure. Particular attention is also given to the commitments of Radical Fictionalism when it comes to discourse about fiction, as in prefixed sentences of the form ‘according to fiction F, … ’. In its final two chapters, the book extends Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse. In Chapter 7 it introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and in Chapter 8 it pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
31

Jay, Gregory S. White Writers, Race Matters. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190687229.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
White liberal race fiction has been an enduringly popular genre in American literary history. It includes widely read and taught works such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird along with period bestsellers now sometimes forgotten. Hollywood regularly adapted them into blockbusters, reinforcing their cultural influence. These novels and films protest slavery, confront stereotypes, dramatize social and legal injustices, engage the political controversies of their time, and try to move readers emotionally toward taking action. The literary forms and arguments of these books derive from the cultural work they intend to do in educating the minds and hearts, and propelling the actions, of those who think they are white—indeed, in making the social construction of that whiteness readable and thus more susceptible of reform. The white writers of these fictions struggle with their own place in systems of oppression and privilege while asking their readers to do the same. The predominance of women among this tradition’s authors leads to exploring how their critiques of gender and race norms often reinforced each other. Each chapter provides a case study combining biography, historical analysis, close reading, and literary theory to map the significance of this genre and its ongoing relevance. This tradition remains vital because every generation must relearn the lessons of antiracism and formulate effective cultural narratives for passing on the intellectual and emotional tools useful in fighting injustice.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
32

Rosenmeyer, Patricia A. Sapphic Memnon. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190626310.003.0005.

Full text
Abstract:
Chapter 5 concentrates on four epigrams by Julia Balbilla, comprising fifty-four lines of Greek elegiac verse—the largest corpus on the colossus by any single author. While most visitors chose to model their language on Homer’s, Balbilla’s style and Aeolic dialect are unmistakably Sapphic (although her elegiac meter is borrowed from epigram rather than lyric). This chapter assesses what it means for Julia Balbilla to imitate Sappho while at the same time honoring her royal patrons in the public context of dedicatory inscriptions. Previous scholars have derided the quality of Balbilla’s poetry, but this chapter recuperates her as a talented poet, a skilled diplomat, and a model for two other women who wrote on the colossus. This chapter argues that Balbilla’s poems testify to the power of the colossus to engage different segments of society: male and female visitors, of high and middle rank, and with varying degrees of literacy.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
33

Meyer, Michel. The elements of rhetoric stricto sensu: the figures of speech. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199691821.003.0006.

Full text
Abstract:
After argumentation comes figurative speech. How many elementary figures should we accept? Four classes of figures, three in the figures of language and one in the figures of thought have given rise to a variety of more or less scholastic catalogs we must learn to set aside. The four basic operators cross over into the four classes of figures and engender the most basic list of possible and necessary figures. This analysis of figurative speech is the springboard into literary rhetoric. Four basic figures are sufficient to derive all others, superseding the impasse created by all past treatises of rhetoric which have disagreed on the right catalog to establish. Chapter 6 settles this question by going back to the classic distinction: figures of sound, figures of grammar, tropes, and figures of thought (Quintilian), corresponding to the four basic operators of thought.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
34

Gilmour, Rachelle. Divine Violence in the Book of Samuel. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190938079.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
Much of the drama, theological paradox, and interpretive interest in the book of Samuel derives from instances of God’s violence in the story. The beginnings of Israel’s monarchy are interwoven with God’s violent rejection of the houses of Eli and of Saul, deaths connected to the Ark of the Covenant, and the outworking of divine retribution after David’s violent appropriation of Bathsheba as his wife. Divine Violence in the Book of Samuel explores these narratives of divine violence from ethical, literary, and political perspectives, in dialogue with the thought of Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum, and Walter Benjamin. The book addresses such questions as: Is the God of Samuel a capricious God with a troubling dark side? Is punishment for sin the only justifiable violence in these narratives? Why does God continue to punish those already declared forgiven? What is the role of God’s emotions in acts of divine violence? In what political contexts might narratives of divine violence against God’s own kings and God’s own people have arisen? The result is a fresh commentary on the dynamics of transgression, punishment, and their upheavals in the book of Samuel. The book offers a sensitive portrayal of God’s literary characterisation, with a focus on divine emotion and its effects. By identifying possible political contexts in which the narratives arose, God’s violence is further illumined through its relation to human violence, northern and southern monarchic ideology, and Judah’s experience of the Babylonian exile.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
35

Townsend, Chris. George Berkeley and Romanticism. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846785.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
George Berkeley’s mainstream legacy amongst critics and philosophers, from Samuel Johnson to Bertrand Russell, has tended to focus on his claim that the objects of our perception are in fact nothing more than our ideas. Yet there’s more to Berkeley than idealism alone, and the poets we now group under the label ‘Romanticism’ took up Berkeley’s ideas in especially strange and surprising ways. As this book shows, the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley focused less on Berkeley’s arguments for idealism than they did on his larger, empirically derived claim that nature constitutes a kind of linguistic system. It is through that ‘ghostly language’ that we might come to know ourselves, each other, and even God. This book is a reappraisal of the role that Berkeley’s ideas played in Romanticism, and it pursues his spiritualized philosophy across a range of key Romantic-period poems. But it is also a rereading of Berkeley himself, as a thinker who was deeply concerned with language and with written—even literary—style. In that sense it offers an incisive case study into the reception of philosophical ideas into the workings of poetry, and of the role of poetics within the history of ideas more broadly.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
36

Goyal, Yogita. Runaway Genres. NYU Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479829590.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today—from unlawful detention to sex trafficking, the refugee crisis, genocide—this project reads a vast range of contemporary literature, showing how the literary forms used to tell these stories derive from the antebellum genre of the slave narrative. Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, the book forwards alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offer a chance not just to rethink the legacy of slavery itself, but also to assess its ongoing relation to race and the human. Taking form seriously in discussions of minority literature, the book examines key genres associated with the slave narrative: sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman. By offering a theory of form and how it travels, the book argues for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of an ethical globalism. Traversing multiple genres and disciplines, the book speaks to African diaspora and African American studies, transnational and world literatures, American studies, postcolonial and global studies, and human rights. Showing how slavery provides the occasion not just for revisiting the Atlantic past but for renarrating the global present, Runaway Genres creates a new map of contemporary black diaspora literature.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
37

Schwehn, Mark R. Exiles from Eden. Oxford University Press, 1992. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195073430.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
In this thoughtful and literate study, Schwehn argues that Max Weber and several of his contemporaries led higher education astray by stressing research--the making and transmitting of knowledge--at the expense of shaping moral character. Schwehn sees an urgent need for a change in orientation and calls for a "spiritually grounded education in and for thoughtfulness." The reforms he endorses would replace individualistic behavior, the "doing my own work" syndrome derived from the Enlightenment, with a communitarian ethic grounded in Judeo-Christian spirituality. Schwehn critiques philosophies of higher education he considers misguided, from Weber and Henry Adams to Derek Bok, Allan Bloom, and William G. Perry Jr. He draws out valid insights, always showing the theological underpinnings of the so-called secular thinkers. He emphasizes the importance of community, drawing on both the secular communitarian theory of Richard Rorty and that of the Christian theorist Parker Palmer. Finally, he outlines his own prescription for a classroom-centered spiritual community of scholars. Schwehn's study will interest all those concerned with higher education in America today: faculty, students, parents, alumni, administrators, trustees, and foundation officers.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
38

ter Haar, Barend J. A Deity’s Conquest of China. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198803645.003.0004.

Full text
Abstract:
From the eleventh century onwards we see an increasing importance of supra-local cults for anthropomorphic deities all over China, including the worship of Lord Guan. In the conventional account of the spread of the cult, it is assumed that people were acquainted with the deity’s image from written narrative traditions, especially the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. This account derives in large part from the typical mind-set of literate elites (including modern scholars) that written texts trump all other forms of cultural influence. This chapter argues that the cult was transmitted all across northern China in particular in the form of oral stories that featured a miraculous event demonstrating Lord Guan’s power. It will be shown how the cult was already widespread by the first half of the early fourteenth century, long before the narrative traditions of the Three Kingdoms acquired their phenomenal popularity and were transformed into written texts.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
39

Cannon Harris, Susan. The Flaming Sunflower: The Soviet Union and Sean O’casey’s Post-Realism. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424462.003.0006.

Full text
Abstract:
Sean O’Casey came to see the Soviet Union as a market for the kind of ideologically-committed and antirealist drama that neither the Abbey Theatre’s directors nor London’s commercial producers wanted. Many of the plays O’Casey wrote after his move to England in 1928 become legible only in the context of the history charted during this book’s first four chapters, the Stalinised British left organizations with which O’Casey worked, and the genre of socialist realism. Investigating the genesis and performance history of O’Casey’s 1939 Communist play The Star Turns Red, this chapter shows how O’Casey’s post-realist aesthetic derives from the literary tradition of queer socialism, which reached him through Shelley and Larkin. Analyzing O’Casey’s nondramatic writing about and for the Soviet Union as well as his American supporters’ insistence that he remained artistically independent of Soviet ideologies about literature, this chapter shows that O’Casey’s ambivalence about British left culture masks an unbounded admiration of the kind of proletarian literature which O’Casey believed – thanks to his limited and misleading contact with it – was represented by socialist realism. O’Casey was also strongly drawn to the heroic and heterosexual masculinity cultivated by official Soviet culture.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
40

Kwame Harrison, Anthony. Ethnography. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199371785.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
Ethnography (Understanding Qualitative Research) provides a comprehensive guide to understanding, conceptualizing, and critically assessing ethnographic research and its resultant texts. Through a series of discussions and illustrations, utilizing both classic and contemporary examples, the book highlights distinct features of ethnography as both a research methodology and a writing tradition. It emphasizes the importance of training—including familiarity with culture as an anthropologically derived concept and critical awareness of the history of ethnography. To this end, it introduces the notion of ethnographic comportment, which serves as a standard for engaging and gauging ethnography. Indeed, ethnographic comportment issues from a familiarity with ethnography’s problematic past and inspires a disposition of accountability for one’s role in advancing ethnographic practices. Following an introductory chapter outlining the emergence and character of ethnography as a professionalized field, subsequent chapters conceptualize ethnographic research design, consider the practices of representing research methodologies, discuss the crafting of accurate and evocative ethnographic texts, and explain the different ways in which research and writing gets evaluated. While foregrounding interpretive and literary qualities that have gained prominence since the late twentieth century, the book properly situates ethnography at the nexus of the social sciences and the humanities. Ethnography (Understanding Qualitative Research) presents novice ethnographers with clear examples and illustrations of how to go about conducting, analyzing, and representing their research; its primary purpose, however, is to introduce readers to effective practices for understanding and evaluating the quality of ethnography.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
41

Sicker, Martin. The Rise and Fall of the Ancient Israelite States. Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2003. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798216009122.

Full text
Abstract:
By subjecting biblical writings to a political analysis, Sicker constructs a plausible political history of the ancient Israelite states that dealt with virtually every issue faced by governments throughout subsequent history. As he makes clear, the way they dealt with those issues, successfully or otherwise, is highly instructive and relevant to today's analysis of geopolitical issues. Our knowledge of the political history of ancient Israel is almost exclusively dependent on the information that may be gleaned from biblical writings, which reflect a historiosophical perspective very different from that employed in modern historical writing. Nonetheless and despite all the problems encountered in dealing with the biblical texts, the history of the ancient Israelite states that can be derived from them has much to offer a student of politics. Instead of the critical literary analysis common to contemporary biblical studies, Sicker constructs a plausible political history of the ancient Israelite states that takes into consideration the geopolitical realities that directly conditioned much of that history as well as the religious dimensions of Israelite political culture that played a critical role in it. He demonstrates that the ancient Israelite states were confronted by virtually every political dilemma, domestic and international, encountered by states and governments throughout the subsequent history of the world. The way they dealt with the issues, successfully or otherwise, is highly instructive and relevant to the complex issues faced by states and governments today.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
42

Nette, Andrew. Rollerball. Liverpool University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325666.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
Rollerball, the Canadian-born director and producer Norman Jewison's 1975 vision of a future dominated by anonymous corporations and their executive elite, in which all individual effort and aggressive emotions are subsumed into a horrifically violent global sport, remains critically overlooked. What little has been written deals mainly with its place within the renaissance of Anglo-American science-fiction cinema in the 1970s, or focuses on the elaborately shot, still visceral to watch, game sequences, so realistic they briefly gave rise to speculation Rollerball may become an actual sport. Drawing on numerous sources, including little examined documents in the archive of the film's screenwriter William Harrison, this book examines the many dimensions of Rollerball's making and reception: the way it simultaneously exhibits the aesthetics and narrative tropes of mainstream action and art-house cinema; the elaborate and painstaking process of world creation undertaken by Jewison and Harrison; and the cultural forces and debates that influenced them, including the increasing corporate power and growing violence in Western society in late 1960s and early 1970s. The book shows how a film that was derided by many critics for its violence works as a sophisticated and disturbing portrayal of a dystopian future that anticipates numerous contemporary concerns, including ‘fake news’ and declining literary and historical memory. The book includes an interview with Jewison on Rollerball's influences, making, and reception.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
43

Brown, Samuel Morris. Joseph Smith's Translation. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190054236.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
Among many remarkable claims, Mormon founder Joseph Smith reported that he had translated ancient scriptures. He dictated the Book of Mormon, an American Bible from metal plates associated with Native antiquity; directly rewrote the King James Bible; and produced a scripture, derived from Egyptian funerary papyri, that he called the Book of Abraham. Smith and his followers used the term “translation” to describe the genesis of these English texts, which remain canonical for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most commenters see these scriptures as merely linguistic objects; the central and controversial question has been whether Smith’s English texts are literal translations of extant source documents. On closer inspection, though, his translations are far more metaphysical than linguistic. These translations express a nonordinary power of language to connect people across barriers of space and time. Within these metaphysical scriptures, Smith expounded a theology of human deification that he also termed “translation.” This one word thus referred to a scripture capable of mediating between the living and the dead and to the transformation of humans into divine beings. Joseph Smith’s projects of metaphysical translation place Mormonism at a productive edge of tense transitions later associated with secular modernity, a modernity challenged by the very existence of the Latter-day Saints. Smith’s translations and the theology that supported them illuminate the power and vulnerability of his critique of American culture in transition as they set the stage for two more centuries of cultural change.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
44

Lindop, Samantha. The Stepford Wives. Liverpool University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781800859364.001.0001.

Full text
Abstract:
The Stepford Wives (Forbes, 1975) occupies an unusual position in cinematic history. As is often the case with cult texts, the film itself was a box office flop, despite the hype of its initial release in the US. Though it was intended as a feminist diatribe, it was fervently derided by Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is literalised in The Stepford Wives. Even Ira Levin, author of the original 1972 novel from which the film was adapted concedes he was less than enthused with what he saw on screen. Despite this, the term Stepford wife has become idiolect for a particular kind of one-dimensional, upper-middle class woman who is figuratively, and to some extent literally, an automation. Indeed, one does not need to have heard of the film or Levin’s book to be familiar concept. Significantly, The Stepford Wives is not a moment in film history. It is an entire universe. It spawned several made-for-television sequels that speak back to gender politics of the 1980s/1990s. It was reimagined by Frank Oz in 2004, starring a high-profile cast including Better Midler and Glenn Close. More recently, it inspired Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed horror film Get Out (2017). This timely and compelling study gives The Stepford Wives the serious scholarly attention it deserves. In doing so, the significance of the film as a socio-cultural and socio-political document in its own right is underscored. While the intention of this book is to pay homage to Forbes’ The Stepford Wives, it goes far beyond this, locating the film in the traditions of the gothic, the histories of feminism and fictional imaginings about artificial women, and real-world developments in social robotics and AI
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
45

Hall, Linda Jones. The Poems of Optatian. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350374409.

Full text
Abstract:
For the first time, the poems and accompanying letters of Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius (Optatian) are published here with a translation and detailed commentary, along with a full introduction to Optatian’s work during this period. Optatian was sent into exile by Constantine sometime after the emperor’s ascent to power in Rome in 312 AD. Hoping to receive pardon, Optatian sent a gift of probably twenty design poems to Constantine around the time of the ruler’s twentieth anniversary (325/326 AD). To enable the reader to experience the multiple messages of the poems, the Latin text is presented near the English translation with any related design close by. Some poems, laid out on a grid of up to 35 letters across and down, have an interwoven poem marking key letters in the primary poem, thereby revealing a highlighted image. Some designs include the chi-rho or numerals created from V’s and X’s to mark imperial anniversaries. Other (previously unrecognised) designs seem to represent senatorial, imperial, military or bureaucratic motifs or to derive from coin images. Shape poems representing a water organ, an altar and a panpipe reveal their relevance immediately. The introduction and commentary elucidate literary allusions from over 100 authors (lines from Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, Silius Italicus, Statius, and lesser-known writers abound) and mythological references, mostly to the Muses and Apollo. Optatian’s prestige as an official in both Greece and Rome is well attested - these poems mark Optatian as a fascinating writer of his time, holding onto the classical past while acknowledging Christian symbolism. Late Antique poets, such as Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius, straddled a divide between inspiration by the Muses and Phoebus Apollo and acceptance of Christianity, which the emperor Constantine had clearly embraced. Optatian solves this dilemma by referring to divine inspiration while marking many of his figural poems with the Chi-Rho, Constantine’s logo on his soldiers’ shields and some coins. The celebration of Constantine’s vicennalia (twentieth anniversary) in 325-326 provides the key impetus. The roles of the young Caesars, especially Crispus, are central; many of the poems celebrate the defeat of Licinius and the re-unification of the Roman Empire. In addition to the twenty poems and letter dedicated to Constantine (and his response), there are ten poems addressed to friends or acquaintances. Optatian is noted for his composition of cento poems which are fabricated from small snippets from over 36 Latin authors, especially Ovid and Vergil, but also from lesser-known writers. Linda Jones Hall explores the political implications of these quotes and finds that many of them can be seen as opposed to civil war. Optatian, a member of the senatorial elite, was redeemed from exile and gained appointments as governor of Achaia and as Prefect of the City. The elaborate usage of acrostic designs which incorporate additional messages, sometimes even in Greek, attracted both attention and imitation in the Middle Ages. Although some of the chronology is obscure, much can be learned about the rise of Constantine due to victories in West and East, by an analysis of Optatian’s panegyrical poems.
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
46

Integrability, Quantization, and Geometry. American Mathematical Society, 2021.

Find full text
APA, Harvard, Vancouver, ISO, and other styles
We offer discounts on all premium plans for authors whose works are included in thematic literature selections. Contact us to get a unique promo code!

To the bibliography