Inventing Afterlives
Title | Inventing Afterlives PDF eBook |
Author | Regina M. Janes |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 588 |
Release | 2018-07-31 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0231546297 |
Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs. In Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they would want or experience were they in that body. From this endlessly recurring situation, afterlife narratives develop in all their complexity, variety, and ingenuity. Exploring afterlives from Egypt to Sumer, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to Christianity’s advent and Islam’s rise, Janes reveals how little concern ancient afterlives had with morality. In south and east Asia, karmic rebirth makes morality self-enforcing and raises a new problem: how to stop re-dying. The British enlightenment, Janes argues, invented the now widespread wish-fulfilling afterlife and illustrates how afterlives change. She also considers the surprising afterlife of afterlives among modern artists and writers who no longer believe in worlds beyond this one. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions; contemporary literature and film; primatology; cognitive science; and evolutionary psychology, Janes shows that in asking what happens after we die, we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.
Inventing Afterlives
Title | Inventing Afterlives PDF eBook |
Author | Regina M. Janes |
Publisher | |
Pages | 371 |
Release | 2018 |
Genre | RELIGION |
ISBN | 9780231185714 |
Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions and contemporary literature and film as well as cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, Inventing Afterlives shows that in asking what happens after we die we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.
Life After Death Today in the United States, Japan, and China
Title | Life After Death Today in the United States, Japan, and China PDF eBook |
Author | Gordon Mathews |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 223 |
Release | 2023-01-24 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1000826627 |
This book is about contemporary senses of life after death in the United States, Japan, and China. By collecting and examining hundreds of interviews with people from all walks of life in these three societies, the book presents and compares personally held beliefs, experiences, and interactions with the concept of life after death. Three major aspects covered by the book Include, but are certainly not limited to, the enduring tradition of Japanese ancestor veneration, China’s transition from state-sponsored materialism to the increasing belief in some form of afterlife, as well as the diversity in senses of, or disbelief in, life after death in the United States. Through these diverse first-hand testimonies the book reveals that underlying these changes in each society there is a shift from collective to individual belief, with people developing their own visions of what may, or may not, happen after death. This book will be valuable reading for students of Anthropology as well as Religious, Cultural, Asian and American Studies. It will also be an impactful resource for professionals such as doctors, nurses, and hospice workers.
The Invention of Angela Carter
Title | The Invention of Angela Carter PDF eBook |
Author | Edmund Gordon |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 561 |
Release | 2017 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0190626844 |
The much-anticipated biography of one of the most beguiling and influential writers of the twentieth-century. With unprecedented access to its subject's personal records and informed by fresh, unvarnished anecdotes from family, friends, and colleagues, Edmund Gordon's biography provides the first full account of Angela Carter's amazing life and enduring work.
Futures of Enlightenment Poetry
Title | Futures of Enlightenment Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | Dustin D. Stewart |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Pages | 321 |
Release | 2020-10-29 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0198857799 |
Explores the creative work of writers and theologians who used their poetic writings as a means to explore and envisage scenarios of embodiment and existence that extended to life after bodily death.
Biofiction and Writers’ Afterlives
Title | Biofiction and Writers’ Afterlives PDF eBook |
Author | Bethany Layne |
Publisher | Cambridge Scholars Publishing |
Pages | 184 |
Release | 2020-06-25 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1527555364 |
The twelve essays collected in this work explore the afterlives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers in biographical fiction, or biofiction, and its sister genre, the biopic. The essays situate these genres in relation to their generic, cultural, and ideological contexts, and are organised into four groups. The first locates the origins of biofiction in the historical novel, and in Modernist experiments in life writing, while the second consists of case studies of biofiction about writers from the long nineteenth century: Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Rupert Brooke. A guest essay by novelist Maggie Gee opens the third group, which analyses the fertile sub-genre of biographical novels about Woolf, while the fourth and final part of the book concerns the related genre of the biopic. The volume is comprised entirely of original commissions, whose authors include postgraduate students, practitioners and specialists in biographical writing. It will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates on life writing and contemporary literature modules, as well as fans of the featured biographical novelists and their subjects.
Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction
Title | Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction PDF eBook |
Author | S. Ahlberg |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 215 |
Release | 2016-04-08 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1137479221 |
Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction offers fresh readings of what has been called "transatlantic literature". In selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts it discovers a shift from oceanic, place-based knowledge to an atmospheric, placeless circulation of information. Consonant with the displacements of the Information Age, this book reads contemporary narrative as it imagines and navigates today's virtual spaces. An important conclusion of the book is that intellectual resources are finite and should be used sustainably. Thus, arguing against a conventional comparative approach, this book proposes reading practices that resist the tendency toward an oversupply of reworked literary contexts that seems bent on matching the reach of the World Wide Web. Instead, the book reimagines place as a practice in the way it is communicated and narrated. Ultimately, this book empowers the reader to reimagine a future for narrative in the Information Age.