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Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works
The Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the
Final Judgment: the Apocalypse is central to Christianity and has
evolved throughout Christianity's long history. Thus, when
ecclesiastics brought the Apocalypse to Indigenous audiences in the
Americas, both groups adapted it further, reflecting new political
and social circumstances. The religious texts in Aztec and Maya
Apocalypses, many translated for the first time, provide an
intriguing picture of this process-revealing the influence of
European, Aztec, and Maya worldviews on portrayals of Doomsday by
Spanish priests and Indigenous authors alike. The Apocalypse and
Christian eschatology played an important role in the conversion of
the Indigenous population and often appeared in the texts and
sermons composed for their consumption. Through these writings from
the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century-priests' "official"
texts and Indigenous authors' rendering of them-Mark Z. Christensen
traces Maya and Nahua influences, both stylistic and substantive,
while documenting how extensively Old World content and meaning
were absorbed into Indigenous texts. Visions of world endings and
beginnings were not new to the Indigenous cultures of America.
Christensen shows how and why certain formulations, such as the
Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, found receptive audiences among the Maya
and the Aztec, with religious ramifications extending to the
present day. These translated texts provide the opportunity to see
firsthand the negotiations that ecclesiastics and natives engaged
in when composing their eschatological treatises. With their
insights into how various ecclesiastics, Nahuas, and Mayas
preached, and even understood, Catholicism, they offer a uniquely
detailed, deeply informed perspective on the process of forming
colonial religion.
Bird by Bird is the bible of writing guides - a wry, honest,
down-to-earth book that has never stopped selling since it was
first published in the United States in the 1990s. Bestselling
novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott distils what she's learned over
years of trial and error. Beautifully written, wise and immensely
helpful, this is the book for all serious writers and
writers-to-be.
Across the eighteenth century in Britain, readers, writers, and
theater-goers were fascinated by women who dressed in men's
clothing from actresses on stage who showed their shapely legs to
advantage in men's breeches to stories of valiant female soldiers
and ruthless female pirates. Spanning genres from plays, novels,
and poetry to pamphlets and broadsides, the cross-dressing woman
came to signal more than female independence or unconventional
behaviors; she also came to signal an investment in female same-sex
intimacies and sapphic desires. Sapphic Crossings reveals how
various British texts from the period associate female
cross-dressing with the exciting possibility of intimate, embodied
same-sex relationships. Ula Lukszo Klein reconsiders the role of
lesbian desires and their structuring through cross-gender
embodiments as crucial not only to the history of sexuality but to
the rise of modern concepts of gender, sexuality, and desire. She
prompts readers to rethink the roots of lesbianism and transgender
identities today and introduces new ways of thinking about embodied
sexuality in the past.
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