First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Elemental Passions explores the man/woman relaitonship in a series of meditations of the senses and the formal elements. Its form resembles a series of love letters in which, however, the identity-and even the reality-of the adressee are deliberately obscured.

Continuing the pioneering work in the field laid bare by the uncovering the Creative Condition of the human being in literature and fine arts, the elemental passion of place leads us through the creative imagination into the labyrinths of the ontopoiesis of life itself (Tymieniecka, in her inaugural study). Essays by A-T. Tymieniecka, Mary Catanzaro, W. Smith, Jadwiga Smith, L. Dunton-Downer, Jorge García Gomez, Ch. Eykmann, Marlies Kronegger, Eldon N. van Liere, Hans Rudnik make this collection a unique contribution to literary studies as well as to the metaphysics of life and of the human condition.

This book provides a rich feast of literary and philosophical insight, offering as it does the first English commentary on Luce Irigaray's poetic text, Elemental Passions. It explores Irigaray's images and intentions, developing the gender drama that takes place within her book, and draws the reader into the conversation between "I-woman" and "you-man" in the text.

The dialectic of light and darkness studied in this collection of essays reveals itself as a primal factor of life as well as the essential element of the specifically human world. From its borderline position between physis and psyche, natural growth and techne, bios and ethos, it functions as the essential factor in all the sectors of life at large. We see its crucial role in all sectors of life while, prompted by man's creative imagination, it enhances and spurs his vital as well as societal and spiritual life. This rare collection contains studies by Thomas Ryba, Krystina Górniak-Kocikowska, Lois Oppenheim, Sydney Feshback, Eldon van Lieve, Sitansu Ray, Theodore Litman, Peter Morgan, Colette Michael, Christopher Lalonde, L. Findlay, Christopher Eykman, Beverly Schlack Randles, Jorge García-Gómez, William Haney, Sherilyn Abdoo, David Brottman, Alan Pratt, Hans Rudnick, George Scheper, Freema Gottlieb, Marlies Kronegger.

Literature reveals that the hidden strings of the human `passional soul' are the creative source of the specifically human existence. Continuing the inquiry into the `elemental passions of the soul' and the Human Creative Soul pursued in several previous volumes of this series, the present volume focuses on the `passions of the earth', bringing to light some of the primogenital existential threads of the innermost bonds of the Human Condition and mother earth. In Tymieniecka's words, the studies purpose to unravel the essential bond between the living human being and the earth - a bond that lies at the heart of our existence. A heightened awareness of this bond should enlighten our situation and help us find our existential bearings.