Orphic Traditions and the Birth of the Gods

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwayne A. Meisner
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Individual Product ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
As If

Orphic Tradition and the Birth of the Gods is a literary history that attempts to reconstruct the fragments of four theogonies that were attributed to the legendary singer Orpheus: the Derveni, Eudemian, Hieronyman, and Rhapsodic Theogonies. Most modern scholars have described these poems as if they were similar to Hesiod’s Theogony—lengthy chronological accounts of the births of the gods from the beginning of time to the present—but this book suggests that a better model for understanding how these poems were composed is to see each of them as an individual product of bricolage (as explained by Claude Lévi-Strauss), rather than as items in the stemma of a static manuscript tradition (as reconstructed by Martin West). The Orphic tradition was more fluid and fragmented than modern reconstructions would lead one to believe, but in these four Orphic theogonies certain features stand out, such as points of comparison with Near Eastern myths, the continuous discourse between Orphic poetry and philosophy, and speculations on the nature of the gods in ways that generated unique deities and new narratives. A study of Orphic theogonies reveals that the Orphic myths of Phanes and Zeus were no less important than the Orphic myth of Dionysus.

Phoenician Literature

2019 ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Carolina López-Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Historical Records ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Great Loss ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Travel Accounts

There was, without a doubt, a Phoenician and Punic literature. Very little of it is extant, but we have enough of it to gauge the great loss. Lacking the advantage of its own manuscript tradition and later cultures devoted to it, Phoenician literature was not systematically preserved, unlike that of the Greeks, Romans, and Israelites. What we have are small pieces that surface among the Classical literary corpus. Despite these unfavorable conditions, an impressive range of literary genres is attested, concentrated in particular genres. Some of this literature aligned with broader ancient Near Eastern tradition: cosmogony, foundation stories, historical records, and other areas that correspond with Phoenician expertise (travel accounts or itineraries, agricultural treatises). Other genres were likely adopted through Greek influence (narrative histories, philosophy). Moreover, from Hellenistic times onward, works by Phoenician authors had to be written and transmitted in Greek in order to survive. Nonetheless, the chapter cautions that we should not lightly categorize them as merely “Greek” literature, at least in the cases in which we know the authors are Phoenicians (including Carthaginians) writing about Phoenician matters.

‘How Much of Nothing There Was’: Trying (Not) to Understand Elizabeth Bowen

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Damian Tarnopolsky
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
World History ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
As If

This chapter notes that one of the strangest aspects of Bowen’s novels of the 1930s and 1940s is the prevalence of nothing in these texts. Examples range from sentences including double or triple negatives and words that cancel themselves out, to descriptions of parts of London destroyed by the Blitz, to scenes built around something missing. Her characters complain that they know nothing about each other or their own motives; her plots often resist final explanation, as if the novels are in some sense about nothing. On every page, in sentences, in her characters’ lives, in her sense of the world, Bowen’s novels pursue a paradoxical task: charting the presence of lack, absence and negativity. The chapter argues that Bowen’s obsessive dealing with nothingness is a clue to her sense of her place and time. Exploring Bowen’s ‘nothings’ is a way of understanding the fractured historical moment in which she wrote, and her response to it; it is also a way of placing her responses to late and high modernism, to world history and literary history.

scholarly journals In a Melting Pot of Autobiography: Pickthall’s With the Turk in Wartime and the Cause of Islam

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 2-16
Author(s):  
Ebtisam Ali Sadiq
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literature Analysis ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive

Marmaduke Pickthall, a half-forgotten British novelist of the early twentieth century, has come back to the spotlight over the past few years. His Near Eastern novels and short stories have started to receive attention in contemporary scholarship but not his two autobiographies. This essay aims at tackling the more neglected piece of the two, With the Turk in Wartime, that deserves attention because of its intricate amalgamation of several features of the genre of autobiography as manifested across its history within the tradition of English literature. Analysis finds that Pickthall’s autobiography has some Romantic, Victorian, and Modern elements as well as some old characteristics of the genre elaborately interwoven into its structure. The study also traces the use that Pickthall makes of this unique autobiography and how the commingling of diverse elements allows him to turn a usually subjective genre into a public cause and dedicate it to the service of Islam. This essay highlights both the diversity that the literary history of the genre lends to Pickthall’s autobiography and the socio-political service it renders to the faith that the author has long esteemed and will ultimately convert to not long after writing this autobiography.

The Pamela Debate

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Henry Fielding ◽  
Usual Sense ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
To Come ◽  
As If

This chapter examines a decisive period in English literary history during the 1740s. This decade saw Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding falling into an unplanned but extraordinary artistic competition that would open two vital channels of production in the novel-writing to come: in Richardson's case toward the representation of inward experience as if mediated by no external authority, in Fielding's toward worldly experience as if mediated wholly by an authoritative storyteller. They did not compete in the usual sense, but such was their entangled proximity it nevertheless seemed a contest. The decade began with Richardson's Pamela (1740), followed by Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), and ended with Richardson's Clarissa (1747–8) and Fielding's Tom Jones (1749). This second pair of novels has long since established itself as the more powerful of the two, rightly enough, but against any other novels of the period the first would easily command superiority.

König und Tempel

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-257
Author(s):  
Michael Pietsch
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Final Stage ◽  
The Political ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Literary Structure ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Sitz Im Leben ◽  
History Of ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The Temple

Abstract When looking at the literary history of the dynastic oracle in 2 Sam 7:1-17 and its narrative embedding in the historiographic concept of Samuel and Kings, one can argue that in the beginning, there was a royal oracle of salvation shaped by a common Ancient Near Eastern royal ideology. Even though the exact wording or the original ‘Sitz im Leben’ of the oracle cannot be identified with any certainty, some observations in the literary structure of the narrative indicate that the ‘deuteronomistic’ narrator in 2 Sam 7 used an earlier form of the dynastic oracle in order to combine it with the motive of building the temple and creating a coherent story that plays a key role in the historiographic structure of his narrative work. Later (dtr) editors enhanced the concept of building the temple over the dynastic promise and interpreted the time of David as the final stage of Israel’s conquest of the land. The dynastic oracle has not been revoked, but the political reign of the Davidides has been relativised, so that the text was opened up for new interpretations and applications, which can be studied in the wide range of its history of reception.

After Auerbach: Ancient Greek Literature as a Test Case of European Literary Historiography

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-128
Author(s):  
Irene J.F. de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
European Literature ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Greek Literature

In the first chapter of his celebratedMimesis(1946) Auerbach discussed a specimen of Ancient Greek literature (Homer) both as the starting point of a European literary history of realism and as a comparandum to biblical storytelling. Both lines of approach have recently been given new impetuses. On the one hand there is Martin West'sThe East Face of Helicon,1which does not merely compare early Greek literature and Near Eastern literature but describes the former as largely a product of the latter. On the other hand there is the series Studies in ancient Greek narrative, edited by Irene J.F. de Jong, which describes the early development of – what will become quintessential – European storytelling devices in Ancient Greek literature. Both scholarly projects, independently, have put the same urgent question on the agenda: how exactly are we to evaluate resemblances between ancient Greek literature and contemporary Near Eastern literature and later European literature. Can we speak of some form of historical connection, i.e. one literature taking over devices and motifs from another literature, or should we rather think in terms of typological resemblances, i.e. of the same narrative universals being employed at different places and at different times? Or is there some middle way to be found in the recent cognitive turn of comparative literature? Despite the methodological problems involved, investigating the history of European literature is an extremely rewarding task. The project of Europe as an economical and political unity has at the moment reached a critical phase. Literary scholars can contribute to this issue by showing the cultural unity of Europe, a mission that is just as urgent as it was in 1946, when Auerbach published hisMimesis.

scholarly journals In a Melting Pot of Autobiography: Pickthall’s With the Turk in Wartime and the Cause of Islam

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebtisam Ali Sadiq
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literature Analysis ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive

Marmaduke Pickthall, a half-forgotten British novelist of the early twentieth century, has come back to the spotlight over the past few years. His Near Eastern novels and short stories have started to receive attention in contemporary scholarship but not his two autobiographies. This essay aims at tackling the more neglected piece of the two, With the Turk in Wartime, that deserves attention because of its intricate amalgamation of several features of the genre of autobiography as manifested across its history within the tradition of English literature. Analysis finds that Pickthall’s autobiography has some Romantic, Victorian, and Modern elements as well as some old characteristics of the genre elaborately interwoven into its structure. The study also traces the use that Pickthall makes of this unique autobiography and how the commingling of diverse elements allows him to turn a usually subjective genre into a public cause and dedicate it to the service of Islam. This essay highlights both the diversity that the literary history of the genre lends to Pickthall’s autobiography and the socio-political service it renders to the faith that the author has long esteemed and will ultimately convert to not long after writing this autobiography.

‘As if’: Mapping the empathic eloquent narrator through literary history

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 175-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Müller ◽  
Tobias Lambrecht
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
As If

This article investigates the historical development of the use of ‘als ob’ (‘as if’) in a diachronic corpus of German narrative fiction prose from the 18th century until 2009. The results of this corpus-stylistic study suggest that ‘as if’-statements are associated with the recurring profile of an eloquent narrator who is more empathic than he is well-informed about the mental state of characters. Finally, we will show that this narrator profile has been used with historical variance that can be explained by literary historical considerations.

Too Close for Comfort: Henry James, Richard Wagner and The Sacred Fount

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
As If ◽  
Mutual Friend

In April 1880, one of the most intriguing lost opportunities in musical-literary history took place. Henry James and Richard Wagner were staying in Posilippo, near Naples. James was beginning a two-month visit to Italy, whilst Wagner was living in the Italian town with his family, working on essays including ‘Religion und Kunst’ (1880) and preparing the staging for Parsifal (1882). A mutual friend, Paul von Joukowsky, suggested to James that he and Wagner meet but the offer provoked an emphatic rejection from the American novelist. It would have taken place amid the heady bohemianism, homosexuality and obsessive aestheticism of Wagner's Italian circle of which Joukowsky was a part. No doubt their meeting would have been stilted and strained, suffused with various forms of social awkwardness, yet, as we shall see, James's explanation of his refusal has the overtones of a justification. Despite – or because of – the aborted meeting, James repeatedly returned to this unrealized encounter in his writing. He referred to the composer or his works in more than a dozen of his novels and short stories from the 1880s to the early twentieth century; these muted but resonant references suggest an informed and engaged response to Wagner and his works. It is as if, though these allusions, James re-imagined this event, composer and novelist encountering each other in numerous texts over a period of 20 years

Improvement of an artificial test substrate technique for evaluation of em immunocytochemical labeling

1987 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 762-763
Author(s):  
G. D. Gagne ◽  
M. F. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Bovine Serum Albumin ◽  
Serum Albumin ◽  
Bovine Serum ◽  
Artificial Substrate ◽  
Chemical Fixation ◽  
As If

We recently described an artificial substrate system which could be used to optimize labeling parameters in EM immunocytochemistry (ICC). The system utilizes blocks of glutaraldehyde polymerized bovine serum albumin (BSA) into which an antigen is incorporated by a soaking procedure. The resulting antigen impregnated blocks can then be fixed and embedded as if they are pieces of tissue and the effects of fixation, embedding and other parameters on the ability of incorporated antigen to be immunocyto-chemically labeled can then be assessed. In developing this system further, we discovered that the BSA substrate can also be dried and then sectioned for immunolabeling with or without prior chemical fixation and without exposing the antigen to embedding reagents. The effects of fixation and embedding protocols can thus be evaluated separately.

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