'What I remember was that it was the first time a piece of fiction had had such a devastating emotional effect on me. A lot of children remember seeing cartoons, Pinocchio or Bambi or something that breaks their heart. I remember seeing The Blue Angel and it breaking my heart. It was the first time I realised there was an adult world - that adults could damage each other or destroy each other emotionally. It might have fed into a whole series of epiphanies about my own upbringing. I was living in a family where my grandparents had separated in quite complex circumstances. Perhaps it resonated with some elements of that, to do with simply how love can be a rupturing and damaging emotion as well as a healing one. Also, to see somebody who is in an authority position made so small, so diminished, by the feeling of having no control.' Anthony Minghella / The Blue Angel 'In a strange, lethal way, I was suddenly wildly attracted to the process of filmmaking, even though it is described as a nightmare - a matter of horror - in that film. There is a trancelike atmosphere. Suddenly, I was reminded that you can feel like it's a matter of life and death when you make a film. It changed from being a mediocre feeling of emptiness in your life to something that feels necessary. I realised that filmmaking can be many things - and it can be narcotic in a way. You can become addicted to it.' Thomas Vinterberg / Hearts of Darkness Screen Epiphanies brings together 32 leading film-makers to discuss the films that inspired them to pursue a career in the movie business, or which influenced their own film-making practice, or which stayed with them because of their depictions of familiar communities, intense human relationships or unknown worlds. Beautifully illustrated with images from the films discussed, Screen Epiphanies is a thought-provoking and often moving insight into the creative process and the way in which artists are inspired by each other's work, but also into the centrality of cinema in all our lives, and its power to change our ambitions and how we see the world around us.

This Strange Loneliness is the first comprehensive account of the poetic relationship between Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth. Peter Mackay explores how Heaney repeatedly turns to the Romantic poet's work for inspiration, corroboration, and amplification, and as a model for the fortifying power of poetry itself, which offers the fundamental lesson that "it is on this earth 'we find our happiness, or not at all.'" Through an in-depth look at archival materials, and at uncollected poems and prose by Heaney, Mackay traces the evolution of Heaney's readings of Wordsworth throughout his career, revealing their shared interest in the connections between poetry and education, the possibility of a beneficial understanding of poetic influence, the complexities of place and displacement, ideas of transcendence, and ultimately the importance of "late style": later poems by Wordsworth might prove a cautionary tale, as well as example, for any poet. Placing Heaney's readings within their political, historical, and poetic contexts the book also explores how he negotiated the complex relationship between Irish and British culture and identity to claim a persistent form of kinship, and forge a strange community, with the Romantic poet. With illuminating readings that reveal new contexts to and currents in Heaney's work, This Strange Loneliness is a powerful evocation of the Irish poet's sense of the "uplift" that poetry can provide.

Structured around the Christian liturgical calendar, Suffering the Truth offers a series of reflections on the exceedingly difficult and yet irrepressibly joyful character of the Christian life. Beginning with a meditation on Advent as a time during which we are called to cultivate a readiness for the unexpected presence of God and concluding with a sermon that sets out to challenge the conception of peace frequently celebrated on the day Mennonites have come to call Peace Sunday, Chris K. Huebner presents an account of the unusual rhythms of Christian temporality. These sermons seek to elaborate a liturgical counter-temporality and to display what it might look like when its rhythms inform the way we go about our ordinary lives. In doing so, Huebner invites us to reflect on how we might inhabit truthfully the strange new life into which we have been called by God.

This book is about haunting in modernist literature. Offering an extended and textually-sensitive reading of modernist spectrality that has yet to be undertaken by scholars of either haunting or modernism, it provides a fresh reconceptualization of modernist haunting by synthesizing recent critical work in the fields of haunting studies, Gothic modernisms, and mourning modernisms. The chapters read the form and function of the ghostly as it appears in the work of a constellation of important modernist contributors, including T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, and Ford Madox Ford. It is of particular significance to scholars and students in a wide range of fields of study, including modernism, literary theory, and the Gothic.

'What I remember was that it was the first time a piece of fiction had had such a devastating emotional effect on me. A lot of children remember seeing cartoons, Pinocchio or Bambi or something that breaks their heart. I remember seeing The Blue Angel and it breaking my heart. It was the first time I realised there was an adult world - that adults could damage each other or destroy each other emotionally. It might have fed into a whole series of epiphanies about my own upbringing. I was living in a family where my grandparents had separated in quite complex circumstances. Perhaps it resonated with some elements of that, to do with simply how love can be a rupturing and damaging emotion as well as a healing one. Also, to see somebody who is in an authority position made so small, so diminished, by the feeling of having no control.' Anthony Minghella / The Blue Angel 'In a strange, lethal way, I was suddenly wildly attracted to the process of filmmaking, even though it is described as a nightmare - a matter of horror - in that film. There is a trancelike atmosphere. Suddenly, I was reminded that you can feel like it's a matter of life and death when you make a film. It changed from being a mediocre feeling of emptiness in your life to something that feels necessary. I realised that filmmaking can be many things - and it can be narcotic in a way. You can become addicted to it.' Thomas Vinterberg / Hearts of Darkness Screen Epiphanies brings together 32 leading film-makers to discuss the films that inspired them to pursue a career in the movie business, or which influenced their own film-making practice, or which stayed with them because of their depictions of familiar communities, intense human relationships or unknown worlds. Beautifully illustrated with images from the films discussed, Screen Epiphanies is a thought-provoking and often moving insight into the creative process and the way in which artists are inspired by each other's work, but also into the centrality of cinema in all our lives, and its power to change our ambitions and how we see the world around us.

The poetics of epiphany have long been recognised as a broad aesthetic trend of modernism, related to the power of art to reveal the hidden essence of reality. Yet the critical use of the concept is still contested, complicated by the fact that in many modernist works exceptional moments are anything but revealing. This book embraces the blurred nature of epiphanies and sets out to explore their effects in a comparative journey paralleling Anglophone and Italian modernist short fiction. The work of four modernist short story writers – Luigi Pirandello, James Joyce, Federigo Tozzi, and Katherine Mansfield – illuminates epiphanies as complex phenomena, connected to multiple aspects of modernist culture, which appear in artistic experiences developed independently in the same decades. The ideas of Henri Bergson, William James, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, nuance our understanding of the stories and of the author's vision behind them. At least three threads emerge, as a result, as common characteristics of modernist epiphanies. First, they are a result of the ‘inward turn’ and of the curiosity about the psyche’s subconscious processes. Second, they attempt to rediscover lived experience as a source of partial but reliable knowledge. Third, they re-actualise mystical experiences as conduits to a secular insight about life. The main appeal of these modernist moments of enlightenment is precisely that they establish an atmosphere of ambiguity where multiple and sometimes irreconcilable potential meanings can be found. By so doing, they succeed in evoking the undifferentiated creative potential that, according to the widespread vitalist philosophies of the age, constitutes the essence of life. In reframing ambiguity and indeterminacy as spaces of creation and choice, epiphanies thus bring out a lesser known, life-affirming but not naïve vein of modernist inspiration.