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: H813
ISBN: 9780881462142
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $35.00
Flannery O’Connor, Tim Gautreaux, and Walker Percy, are all Catholic writers from the South—and seem to embody very fully both parts of that label. Yet as quickly becomes clear in their writing, their fiction employs markedly different tones and modes of addressing their audience.
Why do texts by three writers who each embrace their Southern locale and their Catholic beliefs seem to have so little in common? Nisly helps readers understand these authors’ fiction by examining the role that place and time had in shaping each author’s idea of an audience—and, by extension, his or her manner of addressing that audience.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P463
ISBN: 9780881464375
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00
The C.S. Lewis Phenomenon names the way in which Lewis’s presentations of Christianity in both his fiction and non-fiction depend upon the conventions of the public sphere—this study explores three facets of that phenomenon.
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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: P454
ISBN: 9780881463972
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $22.00
This book establishes that Horton Foote’s characters and themes come from Wharton, Texas, a region influenced more by the Deep South than the cowboy tradition of West Texas. But these interviews also establish that such stories are not place-specific. They are universal stories about going away and the eternal search of emotional and spiritual homes. Foote’s stories are revealed as reflecting the dislocation, loneliness, racial tension, and gender and class divisions of the United States. But he explains that these topics are embedded in his plays and films, not part of a rhetorical approach to writing. He writes in the realist tradition. In every interview, Horton Foote demonstrates his kind, engaging, and sensitive view of life and art.
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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: H816
ISBN: 9780881462173
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $35.00
This book offers a fresh approach to Hawthorne and O’Connor as writers of the American romance. Drawing from a contemporary philosophical context, it applies Gadamer’s cultural critique of modernity to the moral and artistic visions conveyed through the authors’ use of the literary form of romance.
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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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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H819
ISBN: 9780881462203
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $55.00
The Letters of Austin Warren enables a reader to perceive what epistolary art signifies, and to appreciate the rehabilitative powers and possibilities of communication and connection that it generates. A reader who enters into this unique epistolary community will find there a rich and incessant flow of ideas, seriously and strenuously deliberated, as well as to hear conversations that are vigorous, dignified, and sapient in tone and content. One who pores over these letters will take an intimate part in the works and days of Austin Warren, Man of Letters and Epistolary Artist.
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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: 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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