Author: D. R. Davies File Type: pdf This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. Together, the more than one hundred UC Libraries comprise the largest university research library in the world, with over thirty-five million volumes in their holdings. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library.HPs patented BookPrep technology was used to clean artifacts resulting from use and digitization, improving your reading experience.

Author: Claire Jarvis File Type: pdf How did realist novelists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hint at sex while maintaining a safe distance from pornography? Metaphors helped waves, oceans, blooms, and illuminations were all deployed in respectable realist novels to allude to the sexual act, allowing writers to portray companionate marriage while avoiding graphic description. But in Exquisite Masochism, Claire Jarvis argues that some Victorian novelists went even further, pushing formal boundaries by slyly developing scenes of displaced erotic desire to suggest impropriety, perversion, and danger. Through close readings of canonical works by Emily Bronte, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and a modernist outlier, D. H. Lawrence, Jarvis reveals how writers varied use of specific character typesthe dominant woman and the submissive manin conjunction with decadent, descriptive scenes of sexual refusal creates a strong counter-narrative hinting at relationships beyond patriarchal and companionate marriage structures. By focusing on the exquisitely masochistic pleasure brought about by freezing, or suspending, the sexual charge, and by depicting quasi-contractual states on the periphery of marriage, including engagement, adultery, and widowhood, novelists disrupted the marriage plots insistence that erotic drives remain unfulfilled and that sexual connection could be satisfied only by genital act. Complicating our understanding of Victorian marriage ideologys more well-trodden focus on a productive, nation-building ideal, Exquisite Masochism offers fascinating insight into our own cultures debates around illicit sexuality, marriage, reproduction, and feminism. **Review Destined to be a classic, Exquisite Masochism gives a new depth of thinking to central topics of the novel and turns received wisdom inside out. Love, desire, depiction, but also delay, refusal, and dispersed artistic energyJarvis takes us through core scenes of the Victorian and modernist novel to recalibrate our sense of their force and form. The books tremendous importance extends beyond literature, to our imaginations of marriage, individuality, pleasure, and erotic life and their place in art and society. (Mark Greif, author of The Age of the Crisis of Man) A rare first book, Exquisite Masochism represents the remarkable debut of a significant voice in the field. Claire Jarvis mounts a complicated, multifaceted argument about the ideological and affective role played by marriage in Victorian narrative. This wide-ranging, eclectic, and propulsive book will be an event in novel studies. (Nicholas Dames, Columbia University, author of The Physiology of the Novel Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction) Exquisite Masochism discovers a perverse Victorian philosophy of desire in a pattern of frozen postures, unobtrusively distributed across some of our most familiar novels. Claire Jarviss fusion of subtlety and system shows us what academic literary criticism at its best can do. (Michael Clune, Case Western Reserve University) Like a sensitive film critic, Claire Jarvis urges readers to resist the forward movement of narrative and turn to scenes of stasis that recur in novels ranging from 1847 to 1928. Exquisite Masochismuncovers a hitherto unexplored world of sexual tension and unspoken contracts, of dynamism and dominance, of pleasure and pain.This book will beessential reading forthose interested in sex, gender,and the history ofthe novel form (Elsie Michie, Louisiana State University) About the Author Claire Jarvis is an assistant professor of English at Stanford University.

Author: Vance McLaughlin File Type: mobi In the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, greedy self-ordained minister, Reverend Harry Powell, portrayed by Robert Mitchum, kills women and terrorizes children. The hackneyed expression that truth is stranger than fiction, in this case, is not hyperbole. On a small farm in Quiet Dell, eight miles southeast of Clarksburg, West Virginia, two middle-aged women and three children were starved and murdered in the summer of 1931. The five bodies recovered were only intended to be a beginning. Others were scheduled for the abattoir. Meet Harry Powers, also known as Bluebeard, Mail Order RomeoDon Juan, Slaughterhouse Harry, Human Tarantula, and Love Racketeer, one of the most enigmatic and until now, unstudied, sociopaths of the 20th century. **

Author: Marsilio Ficino File Type: pdf The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance. ReviewAn aristocratic devotion to our culture continues to manifest itself even today in the most prestigious centers of study and thought. One has merely to look at the very recent (begun in 2001), rigorous and elegant humanistic series of Harvard University, with the original Latin text, English translation, introduction and notes.--Vittore Branca (Il Sole 24 Ore )The editing and translation of Ficinos text has been done superbly well. Allen and Hankins have begun a work of scholarship of the highest calibre, whose continuation is eagerly awaited. (British Journal for the History of Philosophy )The Loeb Classical Library...has been of incalculable benefit to generations of scholars...It seems certain that the I Tatti Renaissance Library will serve a similar purpose for Renaissance Latin texts, and that, in addition to its obvious academic value, it will facilitate a broadening base of participation in Renaissance Studies...These books are to be lauded not only for their principles of inclusivity and accessibility, and for their rigorous scholarship, but also for their look and feel. Everything about them is attractive the blue of their dust jackets and cloth covers, the restrained and elegant design, the clarity of the typesetting, the quality of the paper, and not least the sensible price. This is a new set of texts well worth collecting.--Kate Lowe (Times Literary Supplement )Ficino set out to show that the ancient Neoplatonic philosophy embodied a gentile theological tradition, one that complemented the Mosaic revelation to the Jews and prepared its devotees for the final truths of Christianity. Ficino worked in full knowledge of the internal complications of Neoplatonism. He wrote and argued in styles that ranged from the logical and synthetic to the poetic and evocative, as he struggled to find ways to prove that the universe was orderly and governed by a Creator and to lay out the place within it of the immortal human soul.--Anthony T. Grafton (New York Review of Books ) ReviewFicino set out to show that the ancient Neoplatonic philosophy embodied a gentile theological tradition, one that complemented the Mosaic revelation to the Jews and prepared its devotees for the final truths of Christianity. Ficino worked in full knowledge of the internal complications of Neoplatonism. He wrote and argued in styles that ranged from the logical and synthetic to the poetic and evocative, as he struggled to find ways to prove that the universe was orderly and governed by a Creator and to lay out the place within it of the immortal human soul.--Anthony T. GraftonNew York Review of Books (10052006)