The Devil of the Second Stairs PDF Download

Author: George Herman
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 0573630054
Category : Despair
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Author: Robert Lima
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813171768
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
“The evil that men do” has been chronicled for thousands of years on the European stage, and perhaps nowhere else is human fear of our own evil more detailed than in its personifications in theater. Early writers used theater to communicate human experiences and to display reverence for the gods governing daily life. Playwrights from Euripides onward sought inspiration from this interplay between the worldly and the occult, using human belief in the divine to govern characters’ actions within a dramatic arena. The constant adherence to the supernatural, despite changing religious ideologies over the centuries, testifies to a deep and continuing belief in the ability of a higher power to interfere in human life. Stages of Evil is the first book to examine the representation and relationship of evil and the occult from the prehistoric origins of drama through to the present day. Drawing on examples of magic, astronomy, demonology, possession, exorcism, fairies, vampires, witchcraft, hauntings, and voodoo, author Robert Lima explores how theater shaped American and European perceptions of the occult and how the dramatic works studied here reflect society back upon itself at different points in history. From representations of Dionysian rites in ancient Greece, to the Mouth of Hell in the Middle Ages, to the mystical cabalistic life of the Hasidic Jews, to the witchcraft and magic of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, Lima traces the recurrence of supernatural motifs in pivotal plays and performance works of the Western tradition. Considering numerous myths and cultural artifacts, such as the “wild man,” he describes the evolution and continual representation of supernatural archetypes on the modern stage. He also discusses the sociohistorical implications of Christian and pagan representations of evil and the theatrical creativity that occultism has engendered. Delving into his own theatrical, literary, folkloric, and travel experiences to enhance his observations, Lima assays the complex world of occultism and examines diverse works of Western theater and drama. A unique and comprehensive bibliography of European and American plays concludes the study and facilitates further research into the realm of the social and literary impact of the occult.

Author: Pat Root
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780671196202
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Copyright
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Author: George Williamson
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815605003
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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George Williamson treats his subject with great precision. Documenting his analyses with ample quotes from the poems and essays, he elucidates the structure and meaning of Eliot’s masterpieces. To make this guide more accessible, the poems are arranged in chronological order, as they appeared in The Complete Poems and Plays.

Author: George Herman
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595209513
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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The brutal "execution" of the patriot woman of Faenza, Diamante, in violation of the laws of sanctuary, creates a division between Cesare Borgia and his sinister condottieri. Maestro Leonardo da Vinci, quietly attempting to reconcile his new profession as engineer to Cesare Borgia, with his philosophy of non violence is caught between the factions. When a sentry is strangled by a "man with strong hands," and two of the condottieri are murdered with Leonardo's own "toys of war", a wedge is driven between the artist/engineer and his patron, an alienation that could prove fatal to Leonardo.Placed under guard by Cesare, the maestro manages to send word of his plight to Niccolo of Pavia, now a Bergamini courtier. Niccolo, enlists the services of the traveling commedia dell'arte players known as I Comici Buffoni, and together they gather the information and evidence that could prove Leonardo's innocence and expose the plot behind the murders.What they learn brings Leonardo and Niccolo to the little Adriatic port of Sinigaglia, where a trap is sprung, a trap that Paolo Giovio called "il bellissimo inganno"—the "magnificent deceit." Here, too, Leonardo comes to realize that the real "toys of war" are not the battle weapons he designs for Cesare, but something much more repugnant and horrifying!

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Author: Steve Ellis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441108491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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T. S. Eliot is one of the most celebrated twentieth-century poets and one whose work is practically synonymous with perplexity. Eliot is perceived as extremely challenging due to the multi-lingual references and fragmentation we find in his poetry and his recurring literary allusions to writers including Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, Baudelaire, and Conrad. There is an additional difficulty for today's readers that Eliot probably didn't envisage: the widespread unfamiliarity with the Christianity that his work is steeped in. Steve Ellis introduces Eliot's work by using his extensive prose writings to illuminate the poetry. As a major critic, as well as poet, Eliot was highly conscious of the challenges his poetry set, of its relation to and difference from the work of previous poets, and of the ways in which the activity of reading was problematized by his work.

Author: T. S. Eliot
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374719209
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 1216

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The first volume of the first paperback edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot This two-volume critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s poems establishes a new text of the Collected Poems 1909–1962, rectifying accidental omissions and errors that have crept in during the century since Eliot’s astonishing debut, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In addition to the masterpieces, The Poems of T. S. Eliot contains the poems of Eliot’s youth, which were rediscovered only decades later; poems that circulated privately during his lifetime; and love poems from his final years, written for his wife, Valerie. Calling upon Eliot’s critical writings as well as his drafts, letters, and other original materials, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the imaginative life of each poem. This first volume respects Eliot’s decisions by opening with his Collected Poems 1909–1962 as he arranged and issued it shortly before his death. This is followed by poems uncollected but either written for or suitable for publication, and by a new reading text of the drafts of The Waste Land. The second volume opens with the two books of verse of other kinds that Eliot issued: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Anabasis, his translation of St.-John Perse’s Anabase. Each of these sections is accompanied by its own commentary. Finally, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a comprehensive textual history that contains not only variants from all known drafts and the many printings but also extended passages amounting to hundreds of lines of compelling verse.

Author: Katarzyna Dudek
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152754544X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The nature of silence is hard to grasp. This book serves to systematize this concept and explore it in the works of three major poets of religious experience: namely, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot and R. S. Thomas. Since these poets worked within a Christian framework, the “silences” they refer to are mainly those emerging in the context of the relationship between God and man in a post-Christian climate. The book’s textual analyses place special attention on the dynamics between thematic and structural manifestations of silence, and are situated at the crossroads of the poetics, philosophy and theology. In this first study bringing together the poetry of Hopkins, Eliot and Thomas, the three poets, each in his unique way, emerge as poetic ministers, practitioners, and producers of silence, who try to find a new language to talk about the Ineffable God and one’s experience of the divine.