Personality in Greek epic, tragedy, and philosophy

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Andrew Ford

"By "literary criticism" we usually mean a self-conscious act involving the technical and aesthetic appraisal, by individuals, of autonomous works of art. Aristotle and Plato come to mind. The word "social" does not. Yet, as this book shows, it should - if, that is, we wish to understand where literary criticism as we think of it today came from. Andrew Ford offers a new understanding of the development of criticism, demonstrating that its roots stretch back long before the sophists to public commentary on the performance of songs and poems in the preliteracy era of ancient Greece. He pinpoints when and how, later in the Greek tradition than is usually assumed, poetry was studied as a discipline with its own principles and methods.". "Serving as a monumental preface to Aristotle's Poetics, this book allows readers to discern the emergence, within the manifold activities that might be called criticism, of the historically specific discourse on poetry that has shaped subsequent Western approaches to literature."--BOOK JACKET.

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Richard Smoley

"This epic, thrilling journey through Bible scholarship and ancient religion shows how much of Scripture is historically false--yet the ancient writings also resound with theologies that crisscrossed the primeval world and that direct us today toward a deep, inner, authentic experience of the truly sacred,"--Amazon.com.

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Robert S. Ellwood

For many people, the 1960s was a period of reawakening. The political and cultural upheavals of the time had a tremendous effect on the spiritual lives of Americans, and American religion in its various forms and incarnations has not been the same since. In this epic survey, Robert Ellwood pulls together the changes that occurred in organized and disorganized religious life during this turbulent decade and sets out to show where those changes came from, following in a chronological manner the religious news and events of the day. The author recalls the unusual role religion played in the 1960 and 1964 presidential elections, the stunning results of the Second Vatican Council, the place of religion in the civil rights and antiwar movements, the emergence of Death of God theology, and the impact of religion on the counterculture. He also interprets what happened in the country spiritually as an important and perhaps permanent shift in the character of American religion, from an institutionally determined to a more subjective experience of the divine.

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Quentin J. Schultze

"Schultze demonstrates how religion and the media in America have borrowed each other's rhetoric. In the process, they have also helped to keep each other honest, pointing out respective foibles and pretensions. Christian media have offered the public as well as religious tribes some of the best media criticism - better than most of the media criticism produced by mainstream media themselves. Meanwhile, mainstream media have rightly taken particular churches to task for misdeeds as well as offered some surprisingly good depictions of religious life."--BOOK JACKET.