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Damascius was head of the Neoplatonist academy in Athens when the Emperor Justinian shut its doors forever in 529. His work, Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, is the last surviving independent philosophical treatise from the Late Academy. Its survey of Neoplatonist metaphysics, discussion of transcendence, and compendium of late antique theologies, make it unique among all extant works of late antique philosophy. It has never before been translated into English.
The Problems and Solutions exhibits a thorough?going critique of Proclean metaphysics, starting with the principle that all that exists proceeds from a single cause, proceeding to critique the Proclean triadic view of procession and reversion, and severely undermining the status of intellectual reversion in establishing being as the intelligible object. Damascius investigates the internal contradictions lurking within the theory of descent as a whole, showing that similarity of cause and effect is vitiated in the case of processions where one order (e.g. intellect) gives rise to an entirely different order (e.g. soul).
Neoplatonism as a speculative metaphysics posits the One as the exotic or extopic explanans for plurality, conceived as immediate, present to hand, and therefore requiring explanation. Damascius shifts the perspective of his metaphysics: he struggles to create a metaphysical discourse that accommodates, insofar as language is sufficient, the ultimate principle of reality. After all, how coherent is a metaphysical system that bases itself on the Ineffable as a first principle? Instead of creating an objective ontology, Damascius writes ever mindful of the limitations of dialectic, and of the pitfalls and snares inherent in the very structure of metaphysical discourse.

F.R. Scott is one of the most remarkable Canadians of his generation. His is a poet - most notably a satirical one - whose anger and impudence have for forty years deflated the pompous, shocked the complacent, and castigated the greedy. He is a lawyer who has vigorously opposed censorship and defended civil rights, and whose knowledge of the law is equalled by his passion for justice; and he is a political and social philosopher who helped form the CCF and New Democratic Parties, and who is now a member of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Readers who have been moved and entertained by his poetry in previous books and in innumerable journals will welcome this bringing together of his best work in one volume. Readers new to his work (if there are any in Canada) will discover a rare combination of wit, intellect, and compassion - 'an informed mind perfectly co-ordinated with a civilized heart.'

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Fables of the East is the first anthology to provide textual examples of representations of oriental cultures in the early modern period drawn from a variety of genres: travel writing, histories, and fiction. Organized according to genre in order to illustrate the diverse shapes the oriental tale adopted in the period, the extracts cover the popular sequence of oriental tales, the pseudo-oriental tale, travels and history, and letter fictions. Authors represented range from the familiar - Joseph Addison, Horace Walpole, Montesquieu, Oliver Goldsmith - to authors of great popularity in their own time who have since faded in reputation such as James Ridley, Alexander Dow, and Eliza Haywood. The selection has been devised to call attention to the diversity in the ways that different oriental cultures are represented to English readers. Readers of this anthology will be able to identify a contrast between the luxury, excess, and sexuality associated with Islamic Turkey, Persia, and Mughal India and the wisdom, restraint, and authority invested in Brahmin India and Confucian China. Fables of the East redraws the cultural map we have inherited of the eighteenth century, demonstrating contemporary interest in gentile and 'idolatrous' religions, in Confucianism and Buddhism especially, and that the construction of the Orient in the western imagination was not exclusively one of an Islamic Near and Middle East. Ros Ballster's introduction addresses the importance of the idea of 'fable' to traditions of narrative and representations of the East. Each text is accompanied by explanatory head and footnotes, also provided is a glossary of oriental terms and places that were familiar to the texts' eighteenth-century readers.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Foreword by George C. Schoolfield>

The ancient world served as an unconventional source of inspiration for a generation of modernists. Drawing on examples from literature, dance, photography, and film, Modernism's Mythic Pose argues that a strain of antimodern-classicism permeates modernist celebrations of novelty, shock, and technology.
The touchstone of Preston's study is Delsartism--the popular transnational movement which promoted mythic statue--posing, poetic recitation, and other hybrid solo performances for health and spiritual development. Derived from nineteenth-century acting theorist Francois Delsarte and largely organized by women, Delsartism shaped modernist performances, genres, and ideas of gender. Even Ezra Pound, a famous promoter of the "new," made ancient figures speak in the "old" genre of the dramatic monologue and performed public recitations. Recovering precedents in nineteenth-century popular entertainments and Delsartism's hybrid performances, this book considers the canonical modernists Pound and T. S. Eliot, lesser-known poets like Charlotte Mew, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, Isadora Duncan the international dance star, and H.D. as poet and film actor.
Preston's interdisciplinary engagement with performance, poetics, modern dance, and silent film demonstrates that studies of modernism often overemphasize breaks with the past. Modernism also posed myth in an ambivalent relationship to modernity, a halt in the march of progress that could function as escapism, skeptical critique, or a figure for the death of gods and civilizations."

"Contexts and Sources" provides readers with a rich selection of documents related to the historical background, language, composition, sale, reception, and newly discovered first half of the manuscript of Mark Twain's greatest work. Included are letters on the writing of the novel, excerpts from the author's autobiography, samples of bad poetry that inspired his satire (including an effort by young Sam Clemens himself), a section on the censorship of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by schools and libraries over a hundred-year period, and commentary by David Carkeet on dialects of the book and by Earl F. Briden on its "racist" illustrations. In addition, this section reprints the full texts of both "Sociable Jimmy," upon which is based the controversial theory that Huck speaks in a "black voice," and "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It," the first significant attempt by Mark Twain to capture the speech of an African American in print. "Criticism" of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is divided into "Early Responses" (including the first negative review) and "Modern Views" by Victor A. Doyno, T. S. Eliot, Jane Smiley, David L. Smith, Shelley Fisher Fishkin (the "black voice" thesis), James R. Kincaid (a rebuttal of Fishkin), and David R. Sewell. Also included is Toni Morrison's moving personal "Introduction" to the troubling experience of reading and re-reading Mark Twain's masterpiece. "A Chronology and Selected Bibliography" are also included.

Today's innovative poets no longer express their dissenting voice on the printed page but in the experimental realm of contemporary media, where holograms, video projections, and even biotechnology form the basis of a new syntax. Celebrated poet and artist Eduardo Kac's" Media Poetry" is the first anthology to document this radically new form, which is taking language beyond the confines of verse and into the non-linear world of digital interactivity and hyperlinkage.This unparalleled volume takes up all the exhilarating incarnations of media poetry, from real-time text generation and spatiotemporal discontinuities to immateriality and visual tempo, exploring the international group of revolutionary poets responsible for such innovations. By embracing the vast possibilities made available by new media, the artists featured in this anthology have become the poetic pioneers of the next millennium.

The Idea of Iambos is a long overdue study of the genre of Greek iambic poetry from the perspective provided by ancient testimonies. Andrea Rotstein places research on iambos in the framework of a new methodological approach to ancient genres based on the cognitive sciences, offering an unprecedented study of ancient theories of genres and the way they affected ancient scholarship. Rotstein also examines the possibility of musical performance of iambic poetry as well as the various occasions of public performance, particularly at musical contests and rhapsodic recitals. Finally, she argues that, from the Archaic to the Classical period, there was a shift from the notion of literary class depending primarily on rhythm and on its archetypical representative, Archilochus, towards iambos as a genre defined mainly by invective as its dominant feature.

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual.

With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

This volume, to which European, American, and Israeli scholars have contributed, is designed to inform students of the Old Testament of the impact of archaeological discovery upon Old Testament study, with particular reference to specific sites. Twenty-five sites are included, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine, and there are three regional studies, of Philistia, the Negeb, and Transjordan. Brief histories of the excavations are given, and the archaeological material is related to the Old Testament in such a way as to bring out points of interest concerning history, geography, chronology, religion, literature, language, law, industry, and the arts. The volumes include bibliographies, illustrations, maps, and a chronological chart.

A scholarly edition of the Divine Poems by John Donne. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

The work of the Hellenistic poets in the third century BC has not only an important place in Greek literature, but also a particular significance for Latin poetry. Despite much technical work on the texts and language of these authors - Theocritus, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, and others - previous literary criticism on most of the major figures is limited in quantity and scope. Dr Hutchinson provides a much needed picture of the poetry of this period, and shows its quality and vitality. He explores the work of the individual writers in turn, while developing a general conception of the poetry as a whole, centred around the poets' handling of tone, level, and form. Of particualr interest to many readers, the book culminates in the presentation of a fresh approach to the influence of Hellenistic poets in Rome. All quotations in Greek or Latin have been translated by the author, making this important new approach to the subject readily accessible to everyone seriously interested in classics - those with simply a basic knowledge of the background as well as students and scholars in the field.

Arising in the 1800s and soon drawing a million readers a day, the commercial press profoundly influenced the work of Bronte, Braddon, Dickens, Conrad, James, Trollope, and others who mined print journalism for fictional techniques. Five of the most important of these narrative conventions--the shipping intelligence, personal advertisement, leading article, interview, and foreign correspondence--show how the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of newspapers. In highly original analyses of Victorian fiction, this study also captures the surprising ways in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling among ordinary readers: from the trauma caused by a lover's reported suicide to the vicarious gratification felt during a celebrity interview; from the distress at finding one's behavior the subject of unflattering editorial commentary to the apprehension of distant cultures through the foreign correspondence. Combining a wealth of historical research with a series of astute close readings, The Novelty of Newspapers breaks down the assumed divide between the epoch's literature and journalism and demonstrates that newsprint was integral to the development of the novel."

A scholarly edition of works by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

For over seventy years there has been no new English edition of the lively and vigorously-written Middle English verse romance of Hauelok, despite the need for a text to meet modern standards of editing. In this new and thorough edition of the poem. Professor Smithers has done much to elucidate the text, providing a detailed glossary, textual notes, and an introduction that contains an account of the main manuscript and of the Cambridge fragments, of the relations of Hauelok to the other main versions of the story, and of the language, the sources, the date of composition. In addition, Smithers supplies a full commentary which goes well beyond those of previous editions in range, scale, and detail.

St. Brigitta of Sweden (1303-73, canonized 1391) was one of the most charismatic and influential visionaries of the later Middle Ages. Altogether, she received some 700 revelations dealing with a variety of subjects, from meditations on the human condition, domestic affairs in Sweden, and ecclesiastical matters in Rome, to revelations in praise of the Incarnation and devotion to the Virgin. Her Revelationes, collected and ordered by her confessors, circulated widely throughout Europe both during her lifetime and long after her death. Many eminent individuals, including Cardinal Juan Torqemada and Martin Luther, read and commented on her writings, which influenced the spiritual lives of countless individuals. Birgitta was also the founder of a new contemplative order, which still exists. She is the patron saint of Sweden, and in 2000 was declared (with Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein) the first co-patroness of Europe. Interest in Birgitta's Revelationes has grown over the past decade. Historians and theologians draw on them for insights into late medieval spirituality, artistic imagery, political struggles, and social life. Scholars of literature study them to gain knowledge of rhetorical strategies employed in late medieval texts by women. Philologists analyze them to enhance understanding of the historical development of Latin and medieval Swedish. Increasingly, Birgitta is also admired and studied as a powerful female voice and prophet of reform. Collectively, the Revelationes encapsulate the workings of an extraordinary mind, alternating between a tender lyricism and a grim intensity and hallucinatory imagination, mixing stereotypical commonplaces with startling and sensational imagery, providing enlightenment on contemporary issues and practical advice about imminent and future events, and showing a constant devotion to the passion of Christ and a close identification with the Virgin. This is the second of four volumes and it contains Book IV and Book V. Book IV includes some of Birgitta's most influential visions, with topics ranging from the Avignon papacy and purgatory, to the Hundred Years War. Book V, the Liber Quaestionum (Book of Questions), takes the form of a learned dialogue between Christ and a monk standing on a ladder fixed between heaven and earth. The argument centers on the way in which God's providence is constantly misunderstood and rejected by self-centered human beings. The translation is based on the recently completed critical edition of the Latin text and promises to be the standard English translation of the Revelationes for years to come. It makes this important text available to a wider audience and provides the basis for new research on one of the foremost medieval women visionaries.

A collection of American poems written for children or traditionally enjoyed by children, by such authors as Longfellow, Poe, Eugene Field, Langston Hughes, Dr. Seuss, and Jack Prelutsky.

Why do authors use pseudonyms and pen-names, or ingeniously hide names in their work with acrostics and anagrams? How has the range of permissible given names changed and how is this reflected in literature? Why do some characters remain mysteriously nameless? In this rich and learned book, Alastair Fowler explores the use of names in literature of all periods - primarily English but also Latin, Greek, French, and Italian - casting an unusual and rewarding light on the work of literature itself. He traces the history of names through Homer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, Dickens, Joyce, and Nabokov, showing how names often turn out to be the thematic focus. Fowler shows that the associations of names, at first limited, become increasingly salient and sophisticated as literature itself develops.

A scholarly edition of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Lost Causes stages a polemical intervention in the discourse that grounds queer civil rights in etiology -- that is, in the cause of homosexuality, whether choice, "recruitment," or biology. Reading etiology as a narrative form, political strategy, and hermeneutic method in American and British literature and popular culture, it argues that today's gay arguments for biological determinism accept their opponents' paranoia about what Rohy calls "homosexual reproduction"-that is, nonsexual forms of queer increase-preventing more complex ways of considering sexuality and causality. This study combines literary texts and psychoanalytic theory--two salient sources of etiological narratives in themselves -- to reconsider phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction: contagion in Borrowed Time, bad influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, trauma in The Night Watch, choice of identity in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and dangerous knowledge in The Well of Loneliness. These readings draw on Lacan's notion of retroactive causality to convert the question of what causes homosexuality into a question of what homosexuality causes as the constitutive outside of a heteronormative symbolic order. Ultimately, this study shows, queer communities and queer theory must embrace formerly shaming terms -- why should the increase of homosexuality be unthinkable? -- while retaining the critical sense of queerness as a non-identity, a permanent negativity.

This book is an anthology of thirteen of the most important articles published on Aeschylus in the last fifty years. It gives roughly equal coverage to the seven surviving plays, and there is also a chapter which places them in the context of Aeschylus' work as a whole. Three articles have< br> been translated into English for the first time, and others have a fresh foreword or postscript by the author. Greek quotations have been translated for the benefit of those reading the plays in English. The editor has supplied a substantial introduction and an index.