Passions


Book Description

Passions is a humorous look at the high-flying world of Parisian haute couture designers, foreign correspondents, political intrigue, and the demands of the big egos involved.




Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England


Book Description

Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health ” physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.




Spanish Passions


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Political Passions


Book Description

Ideas about marriage, gender and the family were central to political debate in late Stuart England. Newly available in paperback, this book shows how political argument became an arena in which the proper relations between men and women, parents and children, public and private were defined and contested. Using sources that range from high political theory to scurrilous lampoons, she considers public debates about succession, resistance and divorce. Weil examines the allegedly fraudulent birth of the Prince of Wales in 1688, the uses to which Williamite propagandists put the image of the paradoxically sovereign but obedient Mary II, anxieties about the influence of bedchamber women on Queen Anne, the political self-image of the notorious Duchess of Marlborough, the relationship of feminism and Tory ideology in the polemical writings of Mary Astell and the scandal novels of Delariviere Manley. Solidly grounded in current historical scholarship, but written in an engaging manner accessible to non-specialists, this book will interest students of literature, gender studies, political culture and political theory as well as historians.




Chaste Passions


Book Description

Virgin martyrs make up one of the largest categories of medieval saints. To judge by their frequent appearances in art and literature, they also figure among the most venerated. The legends of virgin martyrs, retold in various ways through the centuries, illuminate trends in popular piety, values, and literary tastes. Chaste Passions contains sixteen English virgin martyr legends, each of a different saint and each translated into colloquial, modern English prose. Faithful in tone and meaning to the originals, Karen Winstead's lively translations allow contemporary readers to appreciate why virgin martyr legends thrived for hundreds of years. Winstead presents the tales in chronological order, tracing the effects of the composition and tastes of the audience on the development of the genre. The virgin martyr, Winstead tells us, escapes the confining female stereotypes—demure maiden or disruptive shrew—prevalent in writings of the period. Because nearly all of the texts were written by men but addressed to women, they exhibit a fascinating interplay between male views of so-called women's literature and the demands of their intended audience. Familiarity with this widely read genre is essential to a full understanding of medieval culture, and Chaste Passions is an excellent introduction to these often racy, sometimes comic, tales




Beyond Good & Evil: the Galanor Saga Volume I


Book Description

Each book is a freestanding work that relies on the others but can be read independently. In Book One, we find out that Galanor is the last in an ancient line of humanoids who had found their way to Earth thousands of years earlier. They were an exceptional race of creatures and established outposts in various parts of the primeval Earth. One of those places was Atlantis. Raised as an orphan by a man of extraordinary skill and wisdom, he amasses great wealth and prominence. The book opens with him standing at the site of his mentor’s funeral pyre, alone and forlorn. He vows revenge on the entity whose agents caused his friend’s death. As the book unfolds he finds out that he is not an orphan; that his father is the Atlantean High Priest and head of the ruling elite. There first meeting doesn’t go very well; but love and patience win out. Father and son are ultimately reconciled; but, not soon enough. Atlantis is doomed; and Galanor must watch as his new found father, is taken from him by the forces of nature and the demands of the universe. Book two finds Galanor at the helm of a might Atlantean warship: The Salafar. It opens with them docking in port city, in kingdom controlled by the most foul and corrupt of rulers. After taking decisive revenge for the brutal murder one of his most trusted and loyal comrades, he and his crew are pursued to an island where he engages the enemy fleet. During the heat of the battle he is approached by two corrupt and destructive forces: a wizard who promises him a prize of great value in exchange for his assistance; and the incarnation of the demon (Azool) whom he has vowed to destroy. Following the victorious outcome of the battle, the demon takes residence in his soul, sending him into a deep coma. His crew, under the sway of the wizard. Decide to sail to an island where, presumably, a great treasure resides. Galanor escapes Azool’s coma; rescues his crew; discovers the “treasure” is, in fact an ancient map, leading to an island at the top of the world; an island, the existence of which had been erased from human memory a thousand generations before; an island that is his ancestral home, and site of the city built and inhabited by those who first discovered this planet. Once there, he discovers a portal to a realm between realities. Book three, finds Galanor entering the portal and slipping into that interim realm. There, he meets the specters who are it’s sole inhabitants. They explain something of his lineage and of their plight. They want to ask for his help but feel it would mean his doom. He accepts the challenge, knowing full well that he will not survive. With that he passes into the next realm. It is a realm that exist as the sole creation and province of a mad god; and god he has sworn to kill. It is here that Galanor meets the woman the fates have created to be his life mate, Kara-Ma-Nea. She is a strong, skilled and dedicated warrior; a guardian of the borders of her homeland; and heir to an ancient lineage. She is also the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Their loves develops and grows, as he is stricken blind while fighting bat-like creatures in her defense; and she risks everything to save him. In time, she takes him to the mountain retreat of the god whose will sustains her world. He climbs the mountain; encounters the god (whom he discovers is another of his ancestors);and slays him, only to discover that his soul had become a refuge for the the demon-god, Azool. During their exchange, Galanor learns many things about his true nature; things that are to unimaginative for him to accept. He slays Azool (or so he thinks), and discovers that a grey mist is sweeping over the world. It is destroying everything. In killing the god, who was the substance supporting this reality, he has doomed an entire universe, including Kara. He tries to save her, but can’t. He returns to his world a broken and self destructive man. He has to live with the fact that he was responsible for death on an unprecedented scale; and that he taken the life of the only woman he will ever love.




The Passions of Emma


Book Description

Born to a life of wealth and privilege in turn-of-the-century Rhode Island, Emma Tremayne's life is all mapped out for her--including her engagement to the town's most eligible bachelor. Emma's sheltered world is shattered, however, when she discovers the horrifying working conditions in her fiance's textile mill. And when she encounters Shay McKenna, a brave Irish revolutionary, she learns what it will take to defy society's conventions, and experience a love she never thought possible.




A Book of the Passions


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The Passions in Play


Book Description

This monograph is devoted to the most important of Seneca's tragedies, Thyestes, which has had a notable influence on Western drama from Shakespeare to Antonin Artaud. Thyestes emerges as the mastertext of 'Silver' Latin poetry, and as an original reflection on the nature of theatre comparable to Euripides' Bacchae. The book analyses the complex structure of the play, its main themes, the relationship between Seneca's vibrant style and his obsession with dark issues of revenge and regression. Substantial discussion of other plays - especially Trojan Women, Oedipus and Medea - permits a comprehensive re-evaluation of Seneca's poetics and its pivotal role in post-Virgilian literature. Topics explored include the relationship between Seneca's plays and his theory of the emotions, the connection between poetic inspiration and the Underworld, and Seneca's treatment of time, which, in a perspective informed by psychoanalysis, is seen as a central preoccupation of Senecan tragedy.




Ruling Passions


Book Description

OVERTHROWN BY PASSION Crown Prince Alexander Thorne's honorable intentions were overturned when he rescued a red-haired siren from the sea and gave in to the chemistry raging between them. Alex had sworn he would never again be ruled by a woman, yet lovely Sophia Dunhill might be carrying his heir, and duty required she be kept very close at hand. Sophia valued her freedom and had no intention of remaining in Prince Alex's island kingdom for longer than it took to repair her boat—royal command or no. Despite his fiery kisses and their heated nights, Sophia wanted more. Could her love transform her duty-bound prince into a man ruled by his passions?