Twentieth-century Epic Novels


Book Description

Every age that has produced literary epics has also produced variations on the elements that constitute the epic. 'Twentieth-Century Epic Novels' examines the most popular 20th-century manifestations of epic sensibilities by looking closely at five major examples of the 20th-century epic novel.




Loci Communes


Book Description

A new translation of Philipp Melanchthon's Loci Communes into American English directly from the original Latin text. Bilingual edition with the original Latin manuscript in the back. This edition also contains a new Afterword by the Translator. Loci Communes is the first systematic formulation of Protestant theology and a foundational text of multiple denominations, particularly Lutheranism. This also deeply influenced the Reformed tradition as Melanchthon’s pupil Zacharias Ursinus was the main author of the Heidelberg Catechism. In Melanchthon's own words, it is about “the proper dogmas of the Church about God, about eternal things, about the Law of God, about Sin, about the Gospel, about Grace, Justice, and the Sacraments, and later also the doctrine about civil life.” This Systematic Theology was first published in 1521 in New Latin, which was proofread by Luther and published the same year. Luther never wrote a systematic theology because he considered the Loci Communes to be a sufficient summary of Evangelical doctrine. He wrote "next to Holy Scripture, there is no better book" and at one point he talked about adding it to his Biblical canon: "We possess no work wherein the whole body of theology, wherein religion, is more completely summed up, than in Melanchthon's Common-place Book; all the Fathers, all the compilers of sentences, put together, are not to be compared with this book. It is, after the Scriptures, the most perfect of works. Melancthon is a better logician than myself; he argues better. My superiority lies rather in a rhetorical way. If the printers would take my advice, they would print those of my books which set forth doctrine,—as my commentaries on Deuteronomy, on Galatians, and the sermons on the four books of St John. My other writings scarcely serve a better purpose than to mark the progress of the revelation of the gospel."




Lawrence Durrell and the Greek World


Book Description

Novelist Lawrence Durrell's fondness for his adopted homeland of Greece led him to declare "I'm a Greek," and profoundly influenced his work. Attempting to capture the scope of the Greek world's relationship with Durrell's life and work, Lilios (English, U. of Central Florida) presents 22 papers that approach the topic from a range of perspectives. After a number of reminiscences of Durrell by family and friends, a set of essays are organized by place, examining Durrell's relationship with Corfu, Alexandria, Rhodes, and Cyprus. The remaining essays are grouped according to theme discussing such issues as the influence of myth and other "Greek inspirations" on Durrell's novels, poems, and other work. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).




Durrell Re-read


Book Description

Reading the twelve major novels of Lawrence Durrell, this study argues for their consideration as a single major project, an opus, marked by themes of liminality and betweenness. As major texts of mid-twentieth-century literature, repeatedly earning nominations for the Nobel Prize, Durrell’s work has attracted renewed critical attention since his centenary in 2012. This study shows the thematic unity of the opus in five areas. First, by disrupting expectations of love and death and by fashioning plural narrators, works in the opus blend notions of the subject and the object. Second, in their use of metafictional elements, the texts present themselves as neither fiction nor reality. Third, their approach to place and identity offers something between the naturalistic and the human-centric. Fourth, though the texts’ initial concerns are engaged with understanding the past and preparing for a future, they all resolve in something like the present. And fifth, though the novels reject many aspects of modernism, they reside nevertheless between the poles of modernism and postmodernism. Shared with other writers, including T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller, as early as the 1940s, Durrell’s plans for his major works of fiction remained consistent through the publication of the last novel in 1985, and these plans show the need to consider the twelve major works as a unitary whole.



















Opera


Book Description