Author: Denis Donoghue File Type: pdf On Eloquence questions the common assumption that eloquence is merely a subset of rhetoric, a means toward a rhetorical end. Denis Donoghue, an eminent and prolific critic of the English language, holds that this assumption is erroneous. While rhetoric is the use of language to persuade people to do one thing rather than another, Donoghue maintains that eloquence is gratuitous, ideally autonomous, in speech and writing an upsurge of creative vitality for its own sake. He offers many instances of eloquence in words, and suggests the forms our appreciation of them should take.Donoghue argues persuasively that eloquence matters, that we should indeed care about it. Because we should care about any instances of freedom, independence, creative force, sprezzatura, he says, especially when we liveperhaps this is increasingly the casein a culture of the same, featuring official attitudes, stereotypes of the officially enforced values, sedated language, a politics of pacification. A noteworthy addition to Donoghues long-term project to reclaim a disinterested appreciation of literature as literature, this volume is a wise and pleasurable meditation on eloquence, its unique ability to move or give pleasure, and its intrinsic value.**

Author: Muriel Spark File Type: epub In her foreword toAll The Poems(2003) Muriel Spark wrote, Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write poetic prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet. Including previously uncollected work, this new edition demonstrates her ear for the rightness of a line and her eye for the telling detail, her command of poetic forms and her ability to rise to the different challenges of freer verse. Sparks poems are witty, idiosyncratic and haunting, transforming the familiar into glittering moments of strangeness, revealing the dark - and light - music beneath the mundane.

Author: Louise Economides File Type: pdf This book traces the aesthetic of wonder from the romantic period through contemporary philosophy and literature, arguing for its relevance to ecological consciousness. Most ecocritical scholarship tends to overshadow discussions of wonder with the sublime, failing to treat these two aesthetic categories as distinct. As a result, contemporary scholarship has conflated wonder and the sublime and ultimately lost the nuances that these two concepts conjure for readers and thinkers. Economides illuminates important differences between these aesthetics, particularly their negotiation of issues relevant to gender-based and environmental politics. In turn, readers can utilize the concept of wonder as an open-ended, non-violent framework in contrast to the ethos of domination that often surrounds the sublime.**ReviewA most timely intervention into the art and aesthetics of the sublime. One of the first book-length studies to challenge the domination of modern aesthetics by the sublime and the domination of ecocriticism by dark ecology, it promises to outlive the demise of both of these dominants by introducing, archiving, exploring and deploying an alternative, minor aesthetics. Economides presents the poetic figure of wonder as a vibrant, trans-disciplinary constellation of concepts, percepts and affects. (Dianne Chisholm, Professor Emeritus of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada)The Ecology of Wonder investigates an impressive range of literary, philosophical, scientific, and popular texts and discourses, making a nuanced case for wonders status as an aesthetic category distinct from the sublime. Focusing in particular on the ways in which wonder informs responses to the more-than-human world, Louise Economides convincingly demonstrates wonders potential to generate non-dualistic and non-anthropocentric modes of perception, to welcome the new and the strange, and to provide a promising basis for environmental ethics and ecological advocacy. Highly compelling, lucidly argued, and beautifully written, this book is an example of ecocriticism at its finest. (Kevin Hutchings, Professor of English, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada)Highlighting the baleful implications and afterlives of the romantic sublime, The Ecology of Wonder nonetheless provides a cogent demonstration of the continuing value of romantic thought and literature to the project of theorising and composing an ecopoetics whether in the medium of high-tech documentary film or the age-old written word - capable of motivating ecopolitical praxis in the present. This is itself a wondrous book, in which Economides never allows the urgency of the socio-ecological crisis that she discerns to override the need to take the time to think carefully, read closely, and write well, with grace, gravitas and wit. (Kate Rigby, Professor of Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University, UK, author of Topographies of the Sacred The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004) and Dancing with Disaster Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015))From the Back Cover This book traces the aesthetic of wonder from the romantic period through contemporary philosophy and literature, arguing for its relevance to ecological consciousness. Most ecocritical scholarship tends to overshadow discussions of wonder with the sublime, failing to treat these two aesthetic categories as distinct. As a result, contemporary scholarship has conflated wonder and the sublime and ultimately lost the nuances that these two concepts conjure for readers and thinkers. Economides illuminates important differences between these aesthetics, particularly their negotiation of issues relevant to gender-based and environmental politics. In turn, readers can utilize the concept of wonder as an open-ended, non-violent framework in contrast to the ethos of domination that often surrounds the sublime.

Author: Danny Cantrell File Type: epub The Historic Trial That Divided the Women of America Pearl, a stunning flapper in the Roaring Twenties, has danced for Rudolph Valentino, and enjoys the company of any man she chooses--until she decides to carry on an affair with Morgan, a married rural man with two children. Morgans wife, Ina, disguised in borrowed clothing, guns Pearl down when she finds her on a midnight train with her arms around Morgan. The next day, Pearls body is placed on public display for a town of strangers, and her killer is applauded in the streets by hundreds of country women. A dream team of defense attorneys is hired, and the stage is set for a sensational jazz age clash between two distinct views of a womans role in modern society--that of the virtuous rural mother dressed in gingham and the scarlet woman from the city who would deny a mother and her babies the necessities of life. Should death ever be the price for adultery? That is the question the jury--and readers--are faced with in THE UNWRITTEN LAW. Gripping, thought-provoking, and engaging--the reader of The Unwritten Law becomes a participant in one of the most morally divisive murder trials in American history! Scroll up and place a copy in your cart right now. **