Search results for ""Author Anthony Winterbourne""
Associated University Presses A Pagan Spoiled: Sex and Character in Wagner's Parsifal
This book is an original philosopical contextualisation of Wagner's final music-drama in which an analysis of both the sexual dynamics, and the religious and psychological symbolism of the action, provides the foundation for a fresh understanding of the most striking example of the conposer's life-long preoccupation with the feminization of redemption. In addition to discussions of the opera's historical and legendary sources, the author presents an examination of Otto Weiminger's fin de siecle polemic against Judaism and female sexuality, insofar as it has been regarded as itself Wagnerian. It is argued throughout the text that 'Parsifal' has much in it that is Pagan as well as Christian, and indeed that it is the unresolved pre-Christian and non-Christian tensions within the drama that contribute uniquely to its unsettling and still challenging nature.
£79.31
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press When the Norns Have Spoken
This book argues that within Germanic paganism, considered not as mere cult but as a system of beliefs, it is possible to identify a conceptually coherent understanding of fate which detaches that idea from time, and connects it instead with an implicit theses about the nature of truth as written. Germanic cosmogony, as represented in such precise images as a world-tree, provides a context for an analysis of specific metaphors for the workings of fate as woven or spun by such figures as the Nornsthe Norse goddesses of destiny. Employing both philosophical and mythic-linguistic considerations, this book also offers new insights into the persistence of a residual paganism in the understanding of fate following the Christian conversion.
£89.39
