Legend has it that the love of Prince Vlad Dracula's life committed suicide during a siege when the odds of winning were slim. This is the story of Ecaterina Floari, consort to the Wallachian prince who served as inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. A ruthless warlord in the fifteenth century, Prince Dracula fought valiantly against those who would control the land of his ancestors. As his consort, Ecaterina accompanied him in the turbulent years of exile and discovered an ancient force influencing their lives. Her devotion to him was eternal, and she followed him into immortality...

In The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet, Elizabeth Dodd explores the lives and work of four women poets of the twentieth century - H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck. Dodd argues that sexist and male-dominated cultural forces in their personal and professional lives challenged these women to find a unique mode of expression in their poetry, a practice Dodd defines as personal classicism. Dodd uses the term personal classicism to examine modern and contemporary poetry that appears torn between two major modes of poetic sensibility, the Romantic and the Classical. While the four poets she addresses exhibit a poetic sensibility that is primarily Romantic - valuing Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"; adopting a natural, spoken tone; and relying on personal subject matter - they have nonetheless employed masking and controlling strategies that are more nearly Classical. Combining feminist theory and biographical studies with close readings of individual poems, Dodd moves historically from H. D., one of the best-known Imagists, through the Confessional movement, to the major contemporary poet Louise Gluck. In the final chapter Dodd brings us to the present, where she finds women writers still struggling with the recent Confessional legacy of such highly anthologized poets as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet combines thoughtful consideration of both formal and theoretical issues in a graceful prose that reaffirms poetry as an art vitally connected to life. It will be of significant interest to students of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as to those concerned with women's studies.

When we read poetry, we tend to believe that we are getting a glimpse of the interior of the poet's mind--pictures from the poet's imagination relayed through the representative power of language. But poets themselves sometimes express doubt (usually indirectly) that poetic language has the capability or the purpose of revealing these images. This book examines description in Renaissance poetry, aiming to reveal its complexity and variability, its distinctiveness from prose description, and what it can tell us about Renaissance ways of thinking about the visible world and the poetic mind. Recent criticism has tended to address representation as a product of culture; The Unimagined in the English Renaissance argues to the contrary that attention to description as a literary phenomenon can complicate its cultural context by recognizing the persistent problems of genre and literary history. The book focuses on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, who had very different aims as poets but shared a degree of skepticism about imagistic representation. For these poets, description can obscure as much as it makes visible, and can create whole categories of existence that are outside of visibility altogether.

In the context of our increasingly global legal order, Pierre Legendre’s God in the Mirror reconsiders the place of law within the division of existing bodies of knowledge. Navigating the texts of Ovid, Augustine, Roman jurists, medieval canon lawyers, Freud, Lacan, the notebooks of Leonardo de Vinci, and the paintings of Magritte, this third volume of Pierre Legendre’s Lessons focuses on the relation of the subject to the institution of images. Legendre tracks the origins and vicissitudes of the specular metaphor within western history, carrying out a critique of its dependence on the discourse of the Imago Dei. A crucial landmark within Legendre’s ongoing reconsideration of a medieval ‘revolution of interpretation’, this book dissociates the western normative tradition from its mythic foundation, separating theology and law. It thereby documents the advent of modern rational doubt, as a new legal foundation or ground: one that, for Legendre, was not only a revolutionary invention, but one that produced the modern European idea of the State.

Most works of art, whether illustrative, musical or literary, are created subject to a set of constraints. In many (but not all) cases, these constraints have a mathematical nature, for example, the geometric transformations governing the canons of J. S. Bach, the various projection systems used in classical painting, the catalog of symmetries found in Islamic art, or the rules concerning poetic structure. This fascinating book describes geometric frameworks underlying this constraint-based creation. The author provides both a development in geometry and a description of how these frameworks fit the creative process within several art practices. He furthermore discusses the perceptual effects derived from the presence of particular geometric characteristics. The book began life as a liberal arts course and it is certainly suitable as a textbook. However, anyone interested in the power and ubiquity of mathematics will enjoy this revealing insight into the relationship between mathematics and the arts.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series American Arabesque examines representations of Arabs, Islam and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today. Moving from the period of America's engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allen Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, Berman contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.

This issue of The Ministry of the Word includes the last nine messages of the 2007 spring term of the full-time training in Anaheim, California. The general subject of this series of messages is "The Believers." In the final two messages of the previous issue, we covered ten symbols of the believers in the Bible--the wheat of life, the good seed, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the fishers of men, a lamp, a city situated upon a mountain, the sun, virgins, and plants. In this issue we will consider thirty-one more symbols of the believers in the Bible--living stones, sheep, vessels of mercy unto honor and glory, grains of wheat, branches of the vine, branches of the cultivated olive tree, a wise master builder, stewards, a spectacle, the offscouring of the world and the scum of all things, the temple of the Holy Spirit, threshing oxen, contenders in a game, runners in a race, workman in carpentry, nursing mother, father, captives of Christ in His triumphal procession, incense-bearers, ambassadors, letters of Christ, mirrors, earthen vessels, pillars, luminaries, a laboring husbandman, a good soldier, stars, the man-child, the firstfruits and the harvest, and jasper and other precious stones. These symbols of the believers help us to see who we are in Christ and who Christ is in us. Seeing who we are in Christ and who Christ is in us will revolutionize our living and bring us into the life and living of the divine-human mystical incorporation of the Triune God. In this divine-human incorporation the Triune God abides in us, and we abide in the Triune God as the mutual abode of God and man, in which we are being built together and structured together with the Triune God to be the New Jerusalem. There are no reports or announcements in this issue.