Juniper Fuse


Book Description

A commanding meditation on the development of early human imagination.




Companion Spider


Book Description

A penetrating exploration of poetic life by a veteran poet, translator, and editor.




Transcultural Ecocriticism


Book Description

Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriticism explores innovative new directions for the field of environmental literary studies. By examining these literatures across a range of geographical locations and historical periods – from Romantic period travel writing to Chinese science fiction and Aboriginal Australian poetry – the book makes a compelling case for the need for ecocriticism to competently translate between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, planetary and local, and contemporary and pre-modern perspectives. Leading scholars from Australasia and North America explore links between Indigenous knowledges, Romanticism, globalisation, avant-garde poetics and critical theory in order to chart tensions as well as affinities between these discourses in a variety of genres of environmental representation, including science fiction, poetry, colonial natural history and oral narrative.




Nietzsche's Therapeutic Teaching


Book Description

The theme of the philosopher as therapist dominates Nietzsche's entire opus, from his earliest writings to the Zarathustra period and beyond. Nietzsche wishes to hasten the coming and future sanctification of a new type of synthetic human being, and his entire teaching is shaped by his own struggles against illness.Yet few Nietzsche scholars have paid this crucial therapeutic element of his thought sufficient attention. This collection of essays by leading scholars in the field is composed around the Nietzschean insight, which has its roots in the Hippocratic tradition of ancient medicine, that beliefs, behaviours, ideals and patterns of striving are not things for which individuals or even cultures are responsible. Rather, they are symptoms of what an individual or culture is, which symptoms require diagnostic interpretation and evaluation. The book identifies three principal approaches in Nietzsche's philosophy: diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic. Each essay takes up this essential insight into Nietzsche's therapeutic philosophy from a different perspective and collectively they reveal an array of insightful approaches to self-induced enhancement, for both individuals and cultures.




Matter Transmission


Book Description

Arguing for a paleocybernetic approach to current media studies debates, Nicolas Salazar Sutil develops an original framework for a new media ecology that embraces the primitive, the prehistoric, and the brute. Paying serious attention to materials used for cultural mediation that are unprocessed, unexplained, and raw such as bones and limestones, Salazar Sutil posits that advanced industrialisation of new media technology has prompted countercultural movements that call for radical new ways of transmitting culture, for instance through an experiential and high-tech appreciation of prehistoric landscape heritage. The future calls for a Palaeolithic awareness of living landscape as medium for the embodied transmission of cultural imaginaries and memories. The more media technology spurs mass forms of instantaneous media communication, the greater the need for primitive knowledge of earthling body and earthly landscape, our prime media for sustainable cultural transmission.




A Little Tour Through European Poetry


Book Description

This book is both a sequel to author John Taylor's earlier volume Into the Heart of European Poetry and something different. It is a sequel because this volume expands upon the base of the previous book to include many more European poets. It is different in that it is framed by stories in which the author juxtaposes his personal experiences involving European poetry or European poets as he travels through different countries where the poets have lived or worked. Taylor explores poetry from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Lithuania, Albania, Romania, Turkey, and Portugal, all of which were missing in the previous gathering, analyzes heady verse written in Galician, and presents an important poet born in the Chuvash Republic. His tour through European poetry also adds discoveries from countries whose languages he reads fluently-Italy, Germany (and German-speaking Switzerland), Greece, and France. Taylor's model is Valery Larbaud, to whom his criticism, with its liveliness and analytical clarity, is often compared. Readers will enjoy a renewed dialogue with European poetry, especially in an age when translations are rarely reviewed, present in literary journals, or studied in schools. This book, along with Into the Heart of European Poetry, motivates a dialogue by bringing foreign poetry out of the specialized confines of foreign language departments.







Paleolithic Politics


Book Description

Using his background in political theory and philosophical anthropology, Barry Cooper is the first political scientist to propose new interpretations of some of the most famous extant Paleolithic art and artifacts in Paleolithic Politics. This book is inspired by Eric Voegelin, one of the major political scientists of the last century, who developed an interest in the very early symbolism associated with the caves and rock shelters of the Upper Paleolithic, but never finished his analysis. Cooper, who has written extensively on Voegelin’s theories, takes up the enterprise of applying Voegelin’s approach to an analysis of portable and cave art. He specifically applies Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness, his concept of the compactness and differentiation of consciousness, his argument regarding the experience and symbolizations of reality, and his notion of the primary experience of the cosmos to images previously regarded as pedestrian. Cooper demonstrates the political significance of the earliest expressions of human existence and is among the first to argue that political life began not with the Greeks, but 25,000 years before them. Archaeologists, prehistorians, and political scientists will all benefit from this original and provocative work.




Sheela na gig


Book Description

Traces the origins of the Sheela na gig from Medieval times to Paleolithic cave art • Reveals the sacred display of the vulva to be a universal archetype and the most enduring image of creativity throughout the world • Provides meditations on the Sheelas the author encountered in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, allowing readers to commune with the power of these icons • Includes more than 150 photographs and illustrations from around the world For millennia, the human imagination has been devoted to the Goddess, so it is hardly a surprise to find images of supernatural females like Sheela na gigs adorning sacred and secular architecture throughout Ireland, England, Wales, and Scotland. Appearing on rural churches, castles, bridges, holy wells, tombs, and standing stones, these powerful images of a figure fearlessly displaying her vulva embody the power of the Dark Goddess over the mysteries of sex, life, death, and rebirth. Exploring the art and myth of the Sheela na gig from Celtic and Classical times back to Paleolithic cave art, Starr Goode shows how the Sheela embraces a conundrum of opposites: she clearly offers up her ripe sex yet emanates a repelling menace from the upper half of her hag-like body. Through more than 150 photographs, the author shows how the Sheela is a goddess with the power to renew, a folk deity used to help women survive childbirth, and, as a guardian of doorways and castle walls, a liminal entity representing the gateway to the divine. She explains how these powerful images survived eradication during the rise of Christianity and retained their preeminent positions on sacred sites, including medieval churches. The author provides meditations on the individual Sheelas she encountered during her 25 years of research, allowing readers to commune with these icons and feel the power they emanate. Exploring comparable figures such as Baubo, Medusa, the Neolithic Frog Goddess, and vulva depictions in cave art, she reveals the female sacred display to be a universal archetype, the most enduring image of creativity throughout history, and illustrates how cultures from Africa and Ecuador to India and Australia possess similar images depicting goddesses parting their thighs to reveal sacred powers. Explaining the role of the Sheela na gig in restoring the Divine Feminine, the author shows the Sheela to be an icon that makes visible the cycles of birth, death, and renewal all humans experience and a necessary antidote to centuries of suppression of the primal power of women, of nature, and of the imagination.




Zoologies


Book Description

“Beautifully written essays” on animals, “the real and mythological, the ordinary and the exotic, the wild and the domesticated” (Publishers Weekly). Humans were surrounded by other animals from the beginning of time: they were food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and gods. And yet, our companions in evolution are leaving the world—both as physical beings and spiritual symbols—and not returning. In this collection of linked essays, Alison Hawthorne Deming examines what the disappearance of animals means for human imagination and existence. Moving from mammoth hunts to dying house cats, she explores profound questions about what it means to be animal. What is inherent in animals that both leads us to destroy and leads us toward peace? As human animals, how does art both define us as a species and how does it emerge primarily from our relationship with other species? The reader emerges with a transformed sense of how the living world around us has defined and continues to define us in a powerful way. “Beautifully written essays on animal and human behavior and biology . . . highly recommended for lovers of words and nature.” —Publishers Weekly “Human beings live in an age in which industrialization and mass extinction are facts of life. But as Deming suggests in this collection, the more people denude the planet of animals, the more diminished they become in spirit . . . Eloquent, sensitive and astute.” —Kirkus Reviews “Serpentine intellect and wry humor.” —Booklist