Product Code: P262
ISBN: 9780865548947
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00
Whether you’ve been a fan for years or you’ve just recently been hooked by the blockbuster Lord of the Rings movies, "I Am in Fact a Hobbit" is an excellent starting point into the life and work of J. R. R. Tolkien. This indispensable and concise introduction to the career of J. R. R. Tolkien includes:
• a biographical chapter about the man who was a brilliant Oxford professor and Catholic Christian, loving father and devoted husband, and close friend of C. S. Lewis
• overviews and discussions of his best-selling popular works such as the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, his often overlooked academic works and his children’s books such as Roverandom and Mr. Bliss.
• a detailed chronology of the important events and times of his life and career
• an extensive listing of his works, both published and unpublished
• a resource bibliography of the best works about him
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Product Code: H885
ISBN: 9780881464788
Price: $29.00
Ethics for Steinbeck always entailed justice. This didn’t change over the course of his long career.
Justice is constituted of a communal spirit, a relational situation in which individual humans care for their fellows, and a state that champions the cause of the needy and outcast. Any violation merits punishment if incurred by an individual or rebellion if incurred by the state. Upon such points as these most Steinbeck readers agree.
What hasn’t been done before, however, and what SEARCHING FOR EDEN undertakes, is a careful analysis of how these ideas fluctuated at different points during Steinbeck’s literary career. Of utmost importance here are the latter years of Steinbeck’s life when his deepening political involvement and immersion in Arthurian myth shaped a changing ethic altogether.
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Product Code: H891
ISBN: 9780881465020
Price: $35.00
John Updike once wrote that many of his works are "illustrations of Kierkegaard," and yet no current study provides an extended, convincing reason why this is so, why Updike came to live by Søren Kierkegaard's ideas. This study does, telling the story of Updike's life-altering encounter with Fear and Trembling in his early career, and tracing the subsequent evolution of Updike's complex and coherent theology.
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Product Code: H903
ISBN: 9780881465280
Price: $35.00
In the fifty years since her death, Flannery O’Connor studies have been conventionally delimited to two critical parameters: the South and the Church of Rome. This work challenges the conception of O’Connor as inherent to a monolithic South and to orthodox Roman Catholicism by problematizing the “Southern Gothic” trope, positing a non-canonical Southern realism, and repositioning O’Connor as essentially ecumenical in her private theology. The study contextualizes O’Connor’s work within the American scene by detailing the varied political and literary histories of the “North” and “South” as well as opposing the notion of region-specific aesthetics and a native anti-realist mode in the South.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P515
ISBN: 9780881465419
Price: $35.00
What does it mean to become a human being? This question was persistently repeated by Kierkegaard scholar Howard V. Hong (1912–2010) to students during his forty-year tenure at St. Olaf College. As one of Dr. Hong’s students, Jamie Lorentzen never forgot the question—one that always pointed to the ethical upbuilding of individuals.
Lorentzen’s Kierkegaard studies inform commentary on how central characters in four works of literature help readers answer Howard Hong’s question.
Twain’s Huck Finn becomes human by being an unwitting ethicist despite himself and the pro-slavery culture in which he was reared. Ishmael and Queequeg’s embrace of the neighbor and outcast in Melville’s Moby-Dick is an ethical counterpoint to Ahab’s terrifying narcissism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s famous narcissist, Peer Gynt, offers an archetypal negative ethical model for becoming human. Finally, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov show how ethics informs human development in both secular and religious cultures.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H852
ISBN: 9780881463880
Availability: Not currently available. ( Backorder policy)
Price: $29.00
Author and environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams argues that a lack of connection to the land is the direct result of our failure to care intimately about one another. From PIECES OF WHITE SHELL: A JOURNEY TO NAVAJOLAND (1984) to WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS: FIFTY-FOUR VARIATIONS ON VOICE (2012), her writing is born in the red-hot fires of contradiction. A Mormon and a believer in the power of women, an activist and a solitary writer, a student of science and a woman of faith, Williams celebrates paradox and lives both on the page and in the world.
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By author: Aristotle Translated by: David Bolotin
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H959
ISBN: 9780881466638
Price: $45.00
David Bolotin's translation of Aristotle's DE ANIMA, or ON SOUL, aims above all at fidelity to the Greek. It treats Aristotle as a teacher regarding what soul really is, and hence it tries to convey the meaning--to the extent possible in English---of his every word. The translation itself is supplemented with footnotes, some of which, when taken together, sketch the outline of an overall interpretation of the work. For readers--including those who may already know some Greek--who wish to study DE ANIMA with care, it offers access that has hitherto been unavailable in English to the precise meaning of Aristotle's text.
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By author: Aristotle Translated by: David Bolotin
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P575
ISBN: 9780881466645
Price: $18.00
David Bolotin's translation of Aristotle's DE ANIMA, or ON SOUL, aims above all at fidelity to the Greek. It treats Aristotle as a teacher regarding what soul really is, and hence it tries to convey the meaning--to the extent possible in English--of his every word. The translation itself is supplemented with footnotes, some of which, when taken together, sketch the outline of an overall interpretation of the work. For readers--including those who may already know some Greek--who wish to study DE ANIMA with care, it offers access that has hitherto been unavailable in English to the precise meaning of Aristotle's text.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P573
ISBN: 9780881466799
Price: $18.00
DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE? is a unique study of the earliest recorded "discourses" of the Buddha, taking an approach that is at once psychological, philosophical, and literary. In a market abundant with how-to books for spiritual practitioners and advice for achieving a happy life by Buddhist masters, this book offers original readings of some of the most powerful of the Buddha's teachings, which take the form of conversations with a wide range of people: disciples, wandering Hindu philosophers, Brahmin white supremacists, ordinary householders, and even a tyrant. It is a book for all literate, thoughtful people who want to read for themselves what the Buddha really said and to understand their own condition better.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H971
ISBN: 9780881466966
Price: $35.00
An innovative book, WHEN FICTION AND PHILOSOPHY MEET explores the intersection between the philosophy of Simone Weil from Paris, France, and the fiction of Flannery O’Connor from the Southern state of Georgia, USA. In an era of war, of unprecedented human displacements, and of ethnic, racial, and religious fears the ideas of these two intellectuals bear on our present condition.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H974
ISBN: 9780881467048
Price: $35.00
IN COLD BLOOD remains one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century, a study of crime and a polemic against capital punishment that is without peer. Truman Capote purportedly considered it the “first nonfiction novel,” ushering in the era of New Journalism, as defined by Tom Wolfe. It also was the catalyst for a century of crime reporting in America, and crime coverage is by definition popular, involving heightened dramatic conflict, human interest, and questions of morality. The study focuses upon the voices left out of IN COLD BLOOD, which Capote wrote during his whirlwind race to an imaginary finish line.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P583
ISBN: 9780881467062
Price: $30.00
THE INCARNATIONAL ART OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR argues that O’Connor designed a unique asthetic to defy the Gnostic dualisms that characterize American intellectual and spiritual life. Focusing on stories with artist figures, objets d’art, child protagonists, and embodied images, Lake describes how O’Connor’s fiction actively resists romantic theories of the imagination and religious life by highlighting the epistemological necessity of the body. Ultimately O’Connor challenges the romantic and modern notion of the artist as a fire-stealing Prometheus and replaces it with a notion of the artist as a locally committed craftsman.
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