Through the lens of Hopkins's 'masterwork', The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins readdresses Hopkins's frequently overlooked mysticism as an interior narrative within his corpus. Drawing on a range of religious, literary and visual traditions from Augustine's Confessions to the seventeenth-century spiritual emblem, this book demonstrates the ways in which the Wreck deliberately constructs and conceals a mystical and contemplative narrative. Typology and allegory are some of the important hermeneutic tools used in this re-reading of Hopkins, relating the poet to the discursive tradition surrounding the Old Testament Song of Songs, the philosophical theology of the Greek Fathers, and, perhaps most intriguingly, the meditative and visual tradition of the baroque heart-emblem. On the centenary of the publication of Hopkins’s poems, this book places the writer firmly within a mystical tradition, necessitating a fundamental reconsideration of the legacy of this major Victorian poet.

Jaurretche (English, U. of California-Los Angeles) traces the development of the Irish writer's mystical aesthetic through his novels to its supreme culmination and negation in Finnegan's Wake. She also shows how the search to surmount all human categories and sensations in order to encounter the divine, arose and developed in the Middle Ages, and was transmitted into modernism during and just before Joyce's time. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Britain's Gerard Manley Hopkins is beloved for his unusual images of both the physical world and the spiritual life. This is the ideal introduction to the spirituality of the great nineteenth-century Catholic mystic poet. With a preface by Rev. Thomas Ryan, C.S.P., this book is part of a new series, The Mystic Poets.Skylight Paths

As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a re-visioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future. As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds.

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.

Few twenty-first century academics take seriously mysticism's claim that we have direct knowledge of a higher or more “inner” reality or God. But Philosophical Mysticism argues that such leading philosophers of earlier epochs as Plato, G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Alfred North Whitehead were, in fact, all philosophical mystics. This book discusses major versions of philosophical mysticism beginning with Plato. It shows how the framework of mysticism's higher or more inner reality allows nature, freedom, science, ethics, the arts, and a rational religion-in-the-making to work together rather than conflicting with one another. This is how philosophical mysticism understands the relationships of fact to value, rationality to ethics, and the rest. And this is why Plato's notion of ascent or turning inward to a higher or more inner reality has strongly attracted such major figures in philosophy, religion, and literature as Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein. Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism brings this central strand of western philosophy and culture into focus in a way unique in recent scholarship.

For the first time in almost half a century, the world of Hopkins is examined as an indivisible whole. The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins is a synthetic study of Hopkins's writings, written within a framework of semiotic phenomenology.