Search results for ""Author Rachel Falconer""

The first book-length study of Heaney's dialogue with Virgil, one of Seamus Heaney's major literary exemplars.

Read more less

What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? Now available in paperback, this book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering - or discovering - selfhood. In exploring these ideas, this book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray, and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and identity; the ethics of the subject; trauma and memory; descent as sexual or political dissent; the interrelation of realism and fantasy; and Occidentalism and Orientalism. Key Features *Defines and discusses what constitutes Hell in contemporary secular Western cultures *Relates ideas from psychoanalysis to literary traditions ranging from Virgil and Dante to the present *Explores the concept of Hell in relation to crises in Western thought and identity. e.g. distortions of global capitalism, mental illness, war trauma and incarceration *Explains the significance of this narrative tradition of a 'descent to hell' in the immediate political context of 9/11 and its aftermath

Read more less

The first book-length study of Heaney's dialogue with Virgil, one of Seamus Heaney's major literary exemplars Offers a close reading of Heaney's engagement in Virgil, with particular focus on the latter part of his career, from the mid-1980s onward Explores Heaney's dialogue with Virgil in relation to his reading of other writers, ancient, medieval and modern Considers the full corpus of Heaney's writing including translations, original poems, prose writing and radio interviews This book demonstrates the ways in which Virgil's are poems that Heaney 'lived with long and dreamily', especially the descent into the underworld in Aeneid VI. It shows that in his original English poems as well as his translations from Latin, Heaney conjures and transforms familiar Virgilian motifs. The rhythm, pace and musicality of Virgil's hexameters can be heard in Heaney's pastoral eclogues and sonnet sequences. And Virgil's life and times, as well as his poetry, contribute to the shaping of Heaney's prose poetics. In dialogue with Virgil, as well as other classical and modern poets, Heaney develops his notion of the redress of poetry: the counterbalance that poetry can offer against historical tragedy, suffering and loss. The book explores Heaney's intensely productive, thirty-year dialogue with Virgil, beginning with his translation of 'The Golden Bough' in the 1980s and extending through several major volumes, including Seeing Things, The Midnight Verdict, Electric Light, District and Circle, The Riverbank Field, Human Chain, and the posthumously published translation of Aeneid Book VI.

Read more less