And she explores Melville's complex relationship with women, particularly his wife and sisters, on whom he depended to copy and correct his manuscripts. (Renker's evidence that Melville physically and emotionally abused his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville, has already generated attention and controversy).

Drawing on secondary works in archaeology, art history, folklore, ethnohistory, ethnography, and literature, the authors maintain that the mask is the central metaphor for the Mesoamerican concept of spiritual reality. Covers the long history of the use of the ritual mask by the peoples who created and developed the mythological tradition of Mesoamerica. Chapters: (1) the metaphor of the mask in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: the mask as the God, in ritual, and as metaphor; (II) metaphoric reflections of the cosmic order; and (III) the metaphor of the mask after the conquest: syncretism; the Pre-Columbian survivals; the syncretic compromise; and today's masks. Over 100 color and black-&-white photos.

A literary classic that wasn't recognized for its merits until decades after its publication, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick tells the tale of a whaling ship and its crew, who are carried progressively further out to sea by the fiery Captain Ahab. Obsessed with killing the massive whale, which had previously bitten off Ahab's leg, the seasoned seafarer steers his ship to confront the creature, while the rest of the shipmates, including the young narrator, Ishmael, and the harpoon expert, Queequeg, must contend with their increasingly dire journey. The book invariably lands on any short list of the greatest American novels.

A novel of alien gods, monsters, and galactic destruction from the New York Times–bestselling author of the Riverworld series. Captain Ramstan commands the crew of one of the only alaraf-drive vessels capable of instantaneous travel between two points of space. While on an official scientific surveillance expedition, he revises their mission to join the search for a missing ship. But instead of the spacecraft, they discover a planet in its death throes, decimated by meteors that have been launched with extreme velocity from just outside of its atmosphere. The ultimate source of the destruction, however, is beyond anyone’s imagination . . . Ramstan may be the only man who can stop the world-destroying entity known as the “Chaos-Monster” before it follows in their footsteps to Earth. A stolen alien idol offers aid—though at a price. But there are those who hear his warnings as nothing but the rantings of a delusional madman, and Ramstan will have to put his career—and life—on the line to prove that, though he might not be the savior the universe wants, he’s exactly the one it needs. Praise for Philip José Farmer “An excellent science fiction writer.” —Isaac Asimov “[Farmer’s work is a] blend of intellectual daring and pulp fiction prose.” —The New York Times “Farmer offers his audience a wide-screen adventure that never fails to provoke, amuse, and educate. . . . His imagination is certainly of the first rank.” —Time on The World of Tiers “The greatest science fiction writer ever.” —Leslie A. Fiedler, author of Love and Death in the American Novel

Originally published in 1973. Literary critics who have studied tragedy and the tragic vision failed, in Murray Krieger's estimation, to define exactly what they saw as the tragic vision in general terms. An aim of his book is to create a tentative definition of tragic and to flesh out what the author sees as the definition most illuminating of modern literature and the modern mind. In order to do this, Krieger distinguishes between what he sees as the "tragic vision" and "tragedy"—tragedy, from his perspective, is an object's literary form, whereas tragic vision refers to a subject's psychology, the subject's view and version of reality. In light of the shriveling of the tragic concept in the modern world and the reduction of a total view to the psychology of the protagonist, Krieger contends that the protagonist in a tragedy is now more appropriately designated a "tragic visionary" than a "tragic hero."

This book explores the relationship between the sciences of representation and the strategy of landscape valorisation. The topic is connected to the theme of the image of the city, which is extended to the territory scale and applied to case studies in Italy’s Umbria region, where the goal is to strike a dynamic balance between cultural heritage and nature. The studies demonstrate how landscape represents an interpretive process of finding meaning, a product of the relationships between mankind and the places in which it lives. The work proceeds from the assumption that it is possible to describe these connections between environment, territory and landscape by applying the Vitruvian triad, composed of Firmitas (solidity), Utilitas (utility) and Venustas(beauty). The environment, the sum of the conditions that influence all life, represents the place’s solidity, because it guarantees its survival. In turn, territory is connected to utility, and through its etymological meaning is linked to possession, to a domain; while landscape, as an “area perceived by people”, expresses the search for beauty in a given place, the process of critically interpreting a vision.