The white other in American intermarriage stories, 1945-2008

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Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt

The sixteen essays in this collection reflect the individuality and diversity of varied ideas and approaches to Milton scholarship. Readers will no doubt discern points of contiguity among the essays in this volume. For example, several essays investigate sources - literary, pictorial, architectural - and Milton's use of those sources in his poetry. Others view Milton from the perspective of his age and seventeenth-century contemporaries such as Michael Drayton and Aemelia Lanyer. Still others use the twentieth-century methodologies of transformational grammar, deconstruction, and chaos theory to reread Milton's works and assess their prophetic potential. Overall, the essays demonstrate the continued scholarly commitment to a search for truths in and about Milton's works, a process that began in the seventeenth century and promises to continue unabated into the next millennium.

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John McCormick

"From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, George Santayana was a highly esteemed and widely read writer of philosophy, poetry, essays, memoirs, and even a best-selling novel, The Last Puritan. After a period of relative neglect, interest in his work has revived. A complete edited edition of his works is in progress and he has become the object of renewed scholarly activity. Contributing significantly to the renewal was John McCormick's 1987 biography, the first full-scale volume to treat an elusive figure's life and thought in the detail they deserve. Santayana's life was rich in its interior and outer associations. There was his birth and early childhood in Spain followed by a move to Boston, where he came under the influence of William James at Harvard. This led to his career at Harvard as a professor, where Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Walter Lippmann were among his devoted students. We see Santayana in correspondence and conversation with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Ezra Pound, and Robert Lowell. Predominant in Santayana's life was his philosophical work. Hostile to the dominant empiricism of Anglo-American philosophy, he left the academy and remained detached from both the political and ideological movements of early decades of the twentieth century. McCormick relates his skepticism and materialism to a form of idealism deriving from his classical education in Plato and Aristotle, together with his readings in Descartes and Spinoza. He presents Santayana as a supreme stylist in English, who lived a long life always consistent with his stoic epicureanism."--Provided by publisher.

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Peter Kovacs

"The longest war of the Roman imperial period is the war Marcus Aurelius waged with the northern German and Sarmatian tribes. The best-known events of these wars were the lightning and rain miracles. Divine intervention saved the Roman troops who were surrounded by the Germans and suffering from a water shortage, by means of a lightning and rain miracle. Thunderbolts struck the enemy while the rain soothed the Romans' suffering. Several pagan and Christian versions of the miracle existed already in Antiquity." "Peter Kovacs examines these events and their sources in detail. The most important source is the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. The scenes of the column depict the miracles as well and therefore it was studied separately. The author also sketches the history of the Marcomannic wars. He publishes all the sources of the miracles and examines the development of the legend from Antiquity to the 14th century."--Jacket.

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Bettina L. Knapp

The book begins by probing the "Divine Feminine" in Tibet's Gesar of Ling, one of the most fascinating myths of all time. Especially intriguing is the hero's seemingly continuous dependency on the feminine principle for guidance. The heroine in Kalidasa's Sanskrit drama, Sakuntala focuses on the obstacles set in Sakuntala's earthly trajectory, and how these were instrumental in her evolution from the stage of passive, unconscious, and withdrawn archetypal Maiden to that of the conscious, decisive, strong spiritual Mother. To explore the highly complex personalities of Kriemhild and Brunhild in the High German Nibelungenlied is to enter the realm of sun and shadow, the lightened regions of consciousness and the deep interiors of primal darkness. Quiche Mayas's Popul Vuh introduces a primordial couple as active participants in the creation of humankind while Racine's Phaedra projects the dramatist's own gnawing religious conflicts onto his mythical heroine: questions of guilt, remorse, anguish, and fatality/predestination. Yeats's Irish/Celtic feminist and heroine, Deirdre, underscores her inner strength, fortitude, and courage in the face of death while I.B. Singer's "Yentl the Yeshivah Boy" depicts the struggle confronting a young girl from an orthodox Polish Jewish family as she attempts to break out of an ultrapatriarchal society.