This updated sixth edition retains the structure and style of the popular previous editions, and includes two new, much-requested texts: Wulf and Eadwacer and Judith.The book consists of two parts. Part One comprises an introduction to the Old English language, including orthography and pronunciation, inflexions, word formation, an authoritative section on syntax. This is followed by an introduction to Anglo-Saxon studies, which discusses language, literature, history, archaeology, and ways of life. Sound changes are treated as they become relevant in understanding apparent irregularities in inflexion. Part Two contains verse texts, most of them complete, which fully reveal the range that Old English poetry offers in mood, intensity, humor, and natural observation. Full explanatory notes accompany all the texts, and a detailed glossary is provided.The new edition of this highly-acclaimed Guide will be welcomed by teachers and by anyone wanting to gain a greater understanding and enjoyment of the language and literature of the Anglo-Saxons.

    It is literature which draws on popular culture, and engages in speculation about science, history, and all varieties of social relations. This volume brings together essays by scholars and practitioners of science fiction, which look at the genre from different angles. It examines science fiction from Thomas More to the present day; and introduces important critical approaches (including Marxism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory).

    S. Eliot as one of the chief sources for his great poem "The Waste Land," Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance remains a landmark of anthropological and mythological scholarship. In this book she explores the origins of the Grail legend, arguing that it dates back to a primitive vegetation cult and only later was shaped by Celtic and Christian lore.To prove her thesis, Weston unites folkloric and Christian elements by using printed texts to prove the parallels existing between each and every feature of the legend of the Holy Grail and the recorded symbolism of the ancient mystery cults. Specifically, she finds the origin of the Grail legend in a Gnostic text that served as a link between such cults and later Celtic and Christian elaborations of the myth.With erudition and critical acumen, the author provides illuminating insights into diverse aspects of the legend: the task of the hero; the freeing of the waters; medieval and modern forms of nature ritual; the symbols of the cult (cup, lance, sword, stone, etc.); the symbolism of the fisher king; the significance of such deities as Tammuz, Adonis, Mithra, and Attis; the meaning of the adventure of the Perilous Chapel in Grail romances; and much more.Awarded the Crawshay Prize in 1920, this scholarly yet highly readable study will interest any student of the Arthurian legends, mythology, ancient religion, and Eliot's poetry.

    The biographies brought together here provide a rich and varied portrait of the king from two perspectives: that of Einhard, a close friend and adviser, and of Notker, a monastic scholar and musician writing fifty years after Charlemagne's death.

    Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text.Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television."We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect.The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance.These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination.In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

    

    It represents the ideal of an unattainable yet infinitely desirable goal, the possibility of perfection. Initially conceived in literature, it became a Christian icon which has been re-created in a multitude of forms over time even though the Grail has no specific material attributes or true religious significance.Richard Barber traces the history of the legends surrounding the Holy Grail, beginning with Chretien de Troyes's great romances of the twelfth century and the medieval Church's religious version of the secular ideal. He pursues the myths through Victorian obsessions and enthusiasms to the popular bestsellers of the late twentieth century that have embraced its mysteries. Crisscrossing the borders of fiction and spirituality, the quest for the Holy Grail has long attracted writers, artists, and admirers of the esoteric. It has been a recurrent theme in tales of imagination and belief which have laid claim to the highest religious and secular ideals and experiences. From Lancelot to Parsifal, chivalric romances to Wagner's Ring, T. S. Eliot to Monty Python, the Grail has fascinated and lured the Western imagination from beyond the reach of the ordinary world.

    B. Shaw Originally composed in Old French, the two chronicles brought together here offer some of the most vivid and reliable accounts of the Crusades from a Western perspective. Villehardouin's Conquest of Constantinople, distinguished by its simplicity and lucidity, recounts the controversial Fourth Crusade, which descended into an all-out attack on the E astern Christians of Byzantium. In Life of Saint Louis, Joinville draws on his close attachment to King Louis IX of France to recall his campaigning in the Holy Land. Together these narratives comprise a fascinating window on events that, for all their remoteness, offer startling similarities to our own age.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Maybe your teacher took the controversial stand that the Civil War was all about states’ rights… or maybe you learned all about the horrors slavery, but never quite figured out why things didn’t get better after the war ended. If you didn’t go to school in the United States, things are even more confusing. When the media is full of references to the Confederate flag, the legacy of slavery, and poverty in the American South, you might have a vague sense that things are bad because of the Civil War… but why? Why does a war that happened over a hundred and fifty years ago still cast a shadow over the United States? This book will tell you why. It will lead you, step-by-step, through the causes of the Civil War, and the effects. But unlike your high school history teacher, it won’t put you to sleep with long-winded biographies and lists of dates. The names you’ll learn are the big players, the ones with big personalities, who made big differences. In just a few minutes a day, you can read bite-sized stories from the Civil War – quick, easy explanations to guide you through the main points, with just enough scary, surprising, or just plain strange facts to keep you coming back for more. Each chapter ends with a bonus helping of trivia and some quick questions to test your knowledge. By the time you’re finished, you’ll know all the facts your history teacher never taught you – from who said slavery was a “positive good” (and why they thought that), to who dressed up in women’s clothing to escape from Union soldiers.

    Now a distinguished scholar offers the first comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love.Art is a specifically human adaptation, Boyd argues. It offers tangible advantages for human survival, and it derives from play, itself an adaptation widespread among more intelligent animals. More particularly, our fondness for storytelling has sharpened social cognition, encouraged cooperation, and fostered creativity.After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer's "Odyssey" and Dr. Seuss's "Horton Hears a Who!" demonstrating how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of specific works. What triggers our emotional engagement with these works? What patterns facilitate our responses? The need to hold an audience's attention, Boyd underscores, is the fundamental problem facing all storytellers. Enduring artists arrive at solutions that appeal to cognitive universals: an insight out of step with contemporary criticism, which obscures both the individual and universal. Published for the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Origin of Species, " Boyd's study embraces a Darwinian view of human nature and art, and offers a credo for a new humanism.

    Ground Zero and the surrounding areas were photographed countless thousands of times, yet no one really assessed all of the phenomena found in these photographs. What is presented in this book is not a theory and it is not speculation. It is evidence. It is the body of empirical evidence that must be explained in order to determine what happened at Ground Zero.Anyone declaring who did what or how they did it before they have determined what was done is merely promoting either speculation or propaganda. The popular chant, "9/11 was an inside job," is, scientifically speaking, no different from the chant that "19 bad guys with box cutters did it." Neither one is the result of a scientific investigation supported by evidence that would be admissible in court. Neither identifies what crime was committed or how it was committed.The order of crime solving is to determine1) WHAT happened, then2) HOW it happened (e.g., what weapon), then3) WHO did it. And only then can we address4) WHY they did it (i.e. motive).Let us remember what is required to (legally) convict someone of a crime. You cannot convict someone of a crime based on belief. You cannot convict someone of a crime if you don't even know what crime to charge them with. If you accuse someone of murder using a gun, you'd better be sure the body has a bullet hole in it. Yet, before noon on 9/11/01, we were told who did it, how they did it, and why they did it (they hate us for our freedoms); before any investigation had been conducted to determine what had even been done.Many people have speculated as to who committed the crimes of 9/11 and/or how they did so. But without addressing what happened, speculation of this kind is nothing more than conspiracy theory. My research is not speculation. It is a forensic investigation of what happened to the WTC complex on 9/11.

    This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York—three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization.

    In building his argument for "another Middle Ages" (un autre moyen âge), Le Goff documents the emergence of the collective mentalité from many sources with scholarship both imaginative and exact.

    It is based primarily on the 538-line Middle English poem Sir Landevale, which in turn was based on Marie de France's lai Lanval, written in a form of French understood in the courts of both England and France in the 12th century. Sir Launfal retains the basic story told by Marie de France and retold in Sir Landevale, augmented with material from an Old French lai Graelent and a lost romance that possibly featured a giant named Sir Valentyne. This is in line with Thomas Chestre's eclectic way of creating his poetry.In the tale, Sir Launfal is propelled from wealth and status – the steward at King Arthur's court – to being a pauper and a social outcast. He is not even invited to a feast in his home town of Caerleon in South Wales when the king visits, although Arthur knows nothing of this. Out in the forest alone, he meets with two damsels who take him to their mistress, the daughter of the King of Faerie. She gives him untold wealth and a magic bag in which money can always be found, on the condition that he becomes her lover. She will visit him whenever he wants and nobody will see her or hear her. But he must tell nobody about her, or her love will vanish at that instant.The story of a powerful (fairy) woman who takes a lover on condition that he obey a particular prohibition is common in medieval poetry: the French lais of Desiré, Graelant, and Guingamor, and Chrétien de Troyes's romance Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, all share similar plot elements. The presence of a Land of Faerie, or an Otherworld, betrays the story's Celtic roots. A final court scene may be intended by Chestre as criticism of the contemporary legal and judicial framework in late-fourteenth century England.[4] The equation of money with worth in the tale may satirize a late-fourteenth century bourgeois mentality.

    From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities, the book’s topics range from the “alien” experience of blacks in America to the “wake up” cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism. With a twofold aim to entertain and enlighten, Afrofuturists strive to break down racial, ethnic, and social limitations to empower and free individuals to be themselves.