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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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: 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: H999
ISBN: 9780881467680
Price: $35.00
We live in a secular age, where the world and its ways seem to indicate the absence of God. The testimony of ancient and latter-day prophets requires more faith (or credulity) than most of us can manage. Can we still find spiritual truths that will restore a sense of a higher meaning to our lives? For millennia, people have looked to literature, to scriptures, epics, poems, plays, novels, and films for insights into the human condition. In our increasingly rationalized world, some of these contemporary storytellers--like a Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, or Toni Morrison--stretch their art to find new words for the sacred. Brown invites us to reread them to listen for this elusive transcendence, a sacred mystery that rebukes both the atheist's weak humanism and the believer's naïve supernaturalism.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H986
ISBN: 9780881467420
Price: $35.00
UNDERSTANDING THE SHORT FICTION OF CARSON MCCULLERS uses diverse critical techniques to identify how McCullers's short fiction engages with the modern world and contemporary audiences. While McCullers's longer work has received significant critical attention, her short fiction has not received the same treatment. This collection adds to analyses of McCullers's better-known stories as well as considers those that have received little or no critical attention. McCullers's writing maintains lasting appeal because it captures both the joy and sadness of humanity, especially the meaning we draw from connections with others and the pain of isolation when we find it difficult to cultivate these relationships in modern culture.
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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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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H989
ISBN: 9780881467116
Price: $45.00
This collection of essays, presented in honor of Ronna Burger, addresses questions and themes that have animated her thinking, teaching, and writing over the years. With a view to the scope of her writings, these essays range broadly: from the Bible and Ancient Greek authors--including not only Plato and Aristotle, but also Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Xenophon--to medieval thinkers, Maimonides, Dante, and Boccaccio, as well as modern philosophers, from Descartes and Montesquieu to Kant, Lessing, Hegel, and Kierkegaard.
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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: H984
ISBN: 9780881467406
Price: $35.00
Flannery O'Connor is unique in that she is not only familiar with seventeenth-century emblematic representations of scriptural truth, but she is also knowledgeable of the conventions of twentieth-century art forms. Her characters are illuminated by textual images formulated from the juxtaposition of scripture, seventeenth- and twentieth-century archetypes, and street detritus that inhabits pictorial sequences exceeding the boundaries of time and diachronically upending O'Connor's narrative world.
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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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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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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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