The Pain Chronicles - Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering
The Pain Chronicles is a tale of two books: one a broad-brush study of pain throughout the ages in literature, religion, history, art, and philosophy; the other, remarkable insight into the ravages of pain on the individual and the earnest (if hit-and-miss) efforts of modern science to handle chronic pain. An accomplished science writer, Thernstrom neatly balances her own story within the larger context, dividing the book into sections on pain as metaphor, history, disease, narrative, and perception. Some critics found Thernstrom's close-up work less effective than the history.
Renaissance Bodies - The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540 - 1660
Renaissance Bodies is a unique collection of views on the ways in which the human image has been represented in the arts and literature of English Renaissance society. The subjects discussed range from high art to popular culture – from portraits of Elizabeth I to polemical prints mocking religious fanaticism – and include miniatures, manners, anatomy, drama and architectural patronage. The authors, art historians and literary critics, reflect diverse critical viewpoints, and the 78 illustrations present a fascinating exhibition of the often strange and haunting images of the period.
Worlds Made Flesh - Chronicle Histories and Medieval Manuscript Culture
This book focuses on the use of the past in two senses.
First, it looks at the way in which medieval texts from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries discussed the past: how they presented history, what kinds of historical narratives they employed, and what anxieties gathered around the practice of historiography.
Second, this study examines twentieth-century interactions with this textual past, and the problems that have arisen for critics trying to negotiate this radically different textual culture.
Though Milan Kundera has published both poetry and drama, he built his reputation as a writer and garned recognition from critics with the psychological and emotional depth of his novels. Learn more about Kundera's work through essays of some of the most respected literary critics.
This title, Milan Kundera, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of Milan Kundera through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. This title features a short biography on Milan Kundera, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.
Between 1625 and 1640, a distinctive cultural awareness of censorship emerged, which ultimately led the Long Parliament to impose drastic changes in press control. The culture of censorship addressed in this study helps to explain the divergent historical interpretations of Caroline censorship as either draconian or benign. Such contradictions transpire because the Caroline regime and its critics employed similar rhetorical strategies that depended on the language of orthodoxy, order, tradition, and law, but to achieve different ends.
