Chaucer's chain of love

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Roger Y. Clark

"In Stranger Gods Roger Clark offers a study of Salman Rushdie's seven published novels, with a special focus on his earliest, Grimus, and his most powerful and provocative, Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses. Clark shows how Rushdie employs cosmology, mythology, and mysticism to structure otherworldly dramas that are fascinating in their own right, as well as crucial to the more worldly points Rushdie makes about literary tradition, history, ethnicity, and the politics of religion."--BOOK JACKET.

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Phillip Cary

"In this book, Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented the concept of the self as a private inner space - a space into which one can enter and in which one can find God." "Augustine invents the inner self, Cary argues, in order to solve a particular conceptual problem. Augustine is attracted to the Neoplatonist inward turn, which located God within the soul, yet remains loyal to the orthodox Catholic teaching that the soul is not divine. He combines the two emphases by urging us to turn "in then up"--To enter the inner world of the self before gazing at the divine Light above the human mind."--Jacket.

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Giuseppe Mazzotta

In a masterly synthesis of historical and literary analysis, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows how medieval knowledge systems - the cycle of the liberal arts, ethics, politics, and theology - interacted with poetry and elevated the Divine Comedy to a central position in shaping all other forms of discursive knowledge. To trace the circle of Dante's intellectual concerns, Mazzotta examines the structure and aims of medieval encyclopedias especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the medieval classification of knowledge; the battle of the arts; the role of the imagination; the tension between knowledge and vision; and Dante's theological speculations in his constitution of what Mazzotta calls aesthetic, ludic theology. As a poet, Dante puts himself at the center of intellectual debates of his time and radically redefines their configuration. In this book, Mazzotta offers powerful new readings of a poet who stands amid his culture's crisis and fragmentation, one who responds to and counters them in his work. In a critical gesture that enacts Dante's own insight, Mazzotta's practice is also a fresh contribution to the theoretical literary debates of the present.

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John McKinnell

"Close examination of the significant theme of other-worldly encounters in Norse myth and legend, including giantesses, monsters and the dead"--Provided by publisher