The English Cult Of Literature

Author : William R. McKelvy
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813925714
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The English Cult of Literature written by William R. McKelvy and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What constitutes reading? This is the question William McKelvy asks in The English Cult of Literature. Is it a theory of interpretation or a physical activity, a process determined by hermeneutic destiny or by paper, ink, hands, and eyes? McKelvy seeks to transform the nineteenth-century field of "Religion and Literature" into "Reading and Religion," emphasizing both the material and the institutional contexts for each. In doing so, he hopes to recover the ways in which modern literary authority developed in dialogue with a politically reconfigured religious authority.The received wisdom has been that England's literary tradition was modernity's most promising religion because the established forms of Christianity, wounded in the Enlightenment, inevitably gave up their hold on the imagination and on the political sphere. Through a series of case studies and analysis of a diverse range of writing, this work gives life to a very different story, one that shows literature assuming a religious vocation in concert with an increasingly unencumbered freedom of religious confession and the making of a reading nation. In the process the author shifts attention away from the idea of the literary critic in favor of considering the historic role of religious professionals in shaping and contesting the authority of print.Indebted to recent findings of book history and newer historiographies at odds with conventional secularization theory, this work makes an interdisciplinary contribution to revising the existing models for understanding change in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Author : Gregory Maertz
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 3838269810
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Literature and the Cult of Personality written by Gregory Maertz and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe’s authority, a previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of Modernism, is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality. Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and Literature and the Cult of Personality offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, the canonical Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that challenges the myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature. Reviewing and translating German authors provided a means of gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary development according to which 're-writers' become original writers through an apprenticeship of translation and reviewing. In the diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined in this book, textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role; in its place, a full-blown cult of personality emerges along with a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is more fully mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century Europe.

Author : Andrew Calcutt
Publisher : Prion (GB)
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cult Fiction written by Andrew Calcutt and published by Prion (GB). This book was released on 1998 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a novel cult?: drink and drugs; sex and rock 'n' roll?; a window on subcultures?; the ability to tap into the zeitgeist? This book provides an insight into the cult canon assessing 250 authors who have pioneered experiments in style and content, from Kathy Acker and Nelson Algren via Burroughs and Bukowski to Tom Wolfe and Irvine Welsh.

Author : Flor Edwards
Publisher : Turner Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 1683367707
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Apocalypse Child written by Flor Edwards and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first thirteen years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God. The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993. Flor would be thirteen years old. The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her. Apocalypse Child is a cathartic journey through Flor's memories of growing up within a group with unconventional views on education, religion, and sex. Whimsically referring to herself as a real life Kimmy Schmidt, Edwards's clear-eyed memoir is a story of survival in a childhood lived on the fringes.

Author : Gina M. Dorré
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351875892
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse written by Gina M. Dorré and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The horse was essential to the workings of Victorian society, and its representations, which are vast, ranging, and often contradictory, comprise a vibrant cult of the horse. Examining the representational, emblematic, and rhetorical uses of horses in a diversity of nineteenth-century texts, Gina M. Dorré shows how discourses about horses reveal and negotiate anxieties related to industrialism and technology, constructions of gender and sexuality, ruptures in the social fabric caused by class conflict and mobility, and changes occasioned by national "progress" and imperial expansion. She argues that as a cultural object, the horse functions as a repository of desire and despair in a society rocked by astonishing social, economic, and technological shifts. While representations of horses abound in Victorian fiction, Gina M. Dorré's study focuses on those novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Sewell, and George Moore that engage with the most impassioned controversies concerning horses and horse-care, such as the introduction of the steam engine, popular new methods of horse-taming, debates over the tight-reining of horses, and the moral furor surrounding gambling at the race track. Her book establishes the centrality of the horse as a Victorian cultural icon and explores how through it, dominant ideologies of gender and class are created, promoted, and disrupted.

Author : Gina McKinnon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781402774850
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book 500 Essential Cult Books written by Gina McKinnon and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 500 essential cult books brings together some of the best cult books ever written, assembling an incredible list comprising fiction, memoirs, thrillers, sci-fi and fantasy epics, self-help tomes, graphic novels and children's books from across the ages.

Author : Fuminori Nakamura
Publisher : Soho Press
ISBN 13 : 1616957875
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cult X written by Fuminori Nakamura and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The magnum opus by Japanese literary sensation Fuminori Nakamura, Cult X is a story that dives into the psychology of fringe religion, obsession, and social disaffection. When Toru Narazaki’s girlfriend, Ryoko Tachibana, disappears, he tries to track her down, despite the warnings of the private detective he’s hired to find her. Ryoko’s past is shrouded in mystery, but the one concrete clue to her whereabouts is a previous address in the heart of Tokyo. She lived in a compound with a group that seems to be a cult led by a charismatic guru with a revisionist Buddhist scheme of life, death, and society. Narazaki plunges into the secretive world of the cult, ready to expose himself to any of the guru’s brainwashing tactics if it means he can learn the truth about Ryoko. But the cult isn’t what he expected, and he has no idea of the bubbling violence he is stepping into. Inspired by the 1995 sarin gas terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway, Cult X is an exploration of what draws individuals into extremism. It is a tour de force that captures the connections between astrophysics, neuroscience, and religion; an invective against predatory corporate consumerism and exploitative geopolitics; and a love story about compassion in the face of nihilism.

Author : Joanne Parker
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526130564
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book ‘England’s darling’ written by Joanne Parker and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last two decades, numerous studies have been devoted to the Victorian fascination with King Arthur, however . the figure of King Alfred has received almost no attention. For much of the nineteenth century, Alfred was as important as Arthur in the British popular imagination. A pervasive cult of the king developed which included the erection of at least four public statues, the completion of more than twenty-five paintings, and the publication of over a hundred texts, by authors ranging from Wordsworth to minor women writers. By 1852, J.A. Froude could describe Alfred’s life as ‘the favourite story in English nurseries’; in 1901, a national holiday marked the thousandth anniversary of his death, organised by a committee including Edward Burne Jones, Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hughes. England’s darling sets out to answer the questions that must arise in the face of such nineteenth-century enthusiasm for a long-dead king. It addresses a genuine gap in the literature on Victorian medievalism in particular and cultural history in general and argues that knowledge of the cult of Alfred is crucial to understanding the Victorian cultural map. The book examines the ways in which Alfred was rewritten by nineteenth-century authors and artists, and asks how beliefs about the Saxon king’s reign and achievements related to nineteenth-century ideals about leadership, law, religion, commerce, education and the Empire. The book concludes by addressing the most interesting enigma in Alfred’s reception history: why is the king no longer ‘England’s darling’? A fascinating study that will be enjoyed by scholars of history, cultural history, literature and art history.

Author : Charles LaPorte
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108853463
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare written by Charles LaPorte and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Victorian era, William Shakespeare's work was often celebrated as a sacred text: a sort of secular English Bible. Even today, Shakespeare remains a uniquely important literary figure. Yet Victorian criticism took on religious dimensions that now seem outlandish in retrospect. Ministers wrote sermons based upon Shakespearean texts and delivered them from pulpits in Christian churches. Some scholars crafted devotional volumes to compare his texts directly with the Bible's. Still others created Shakespearean societies in the faith that his inspiration was not like that of other playwrights. Charles LaPorte uses such examples from the Victorian cult of Shakespeare to illustrate the complex relationship between religion, literature and secularization. His work helps to illuminate a curious but crucial chapter in the history of modern literary studies in the West, as well as its connections with Biblical scholarship and textual criticism.

Author : Virginia Blanton
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271047984
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Signs of Devotion written by Virginia Blanton and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: