Avilion

At the heart of Ryhope Wood, Steven and the mythago Guiwenneth live in the ruins of a Roman villa close to a haunted fortress from the Iron Age, from which Guiwenneth's myth arose. She is comfortable here, almost tied to the place, and Steven has long since abandoned all thought of returning to his own world. They have animals, protection and crops. But this idyll cannot last. The hunters who protected Guiwenneth as a child have come to warn her she is in danger. Yssobel is dreaming increasingly of her Uncle Christian, Steven's brother, who disappeared into Lavondyss, and Jack wants to see 'the outer world' more than anything. Events are about to overtake them.

This book is a detailed examination of one of the most important works of fantasy literature from the twentieth century. It goes through Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock considering how it engages with war on a personal and family level, how it plays with ideas of time as something fluid and disturbing, and how it presents mythology as something crude and dangerous. The book places Mythago Wood in the context of Holdstock’s other works, noting in part how complex ideas of time have been a consistent element in his fiction. The book also briefly examines how the themes laid out in Mythago Wood are carried through into later books in the sequence as well as the Merlin Codex

This collection consists of eight essays that examine the way narratives determine our understanding of old age and condition how the experience is lived. Contributors to this volume have based their analysis on the concept of »narrative identity« developed by Paul Ricoeur, built upon the idea that fiction makes life, and on his definition of »trace« as the mark of time. By investigating the traces of aging imprinted in a series of literary and filmic works they dismantle the narrative of old age as decline and foreclosure to assemble one of transformation and growth.

Tennysonian Love was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In the century or so since Alfred Tennyson's poetry reached the height of its popularity and critical acclaim, the pendulum of criticism has swung wide in opposite directions. From the earlier idolatry to the later ridicule, that pendulum has now settled into a position of qualified and selective praise from which a more thoughtful consideration of the poet is possible. Consequently, as this critical study suggests, new values and dimensions are recognizable in his work. Professor Joseph, concentrating on the theme of love but involving in his argument other facets of Tennyson's achievement, demonstrates the thesis that the poet moved as in a "strange diagonal." This phrase used as the subtitle of the book comes from Tennyson's poem The Princess in which the narrator "moved as in a strange diagonal / And maybe neither pleased myself nor them." As the author shows, Tennyson throughout his work moved between a Platonic conception of love in which the highest kind of spiritual love has disencumbered itself of sense and a Neoplatonic ("Dantesque") one in which sense and soul tend to merge. In coming to terms with the nineteenth-century form of this divided Western heritage, the pietism of the evangelical revival on the one hand and the idealized eroticism of his Romantic predecessors on the other, Tennyson became the exemplary poet of Victorian love. No other Victorian poet, Professor Joseph concludes, exhibits quite his representative and successful blending of these clashing strains. For while moving between the alternate traditions of Western love, Tennyson was able to forge a large body of highly disciplined, beautifully wrought, and far-ranging verse.