Breath Of Passion

First published in 1972, this volume contains contemporary British periodical reviews of Lord Byron and Regency Society Poets, including Rogers, Campbell and Moore, in publications from the Examiner to the Literary Examiner. Introductions to each periodical provide brief sketches of each publication as well as names, dates and bibliographical information. Headnotes offer bibliographical data of the reviews and suggested approaches to studying them. This book will be of interest to those studying the Romantics and English literature.

Wayne Clifford’s The Exile’s Papers first appeared in 2007 with the publication of The Duplicity of Autobiography, but this creative project – a four-part series of hundreds of surreal, straightforward, narrative or mythic, and endlessly varying sonnets – is the culmination of decades of effort. In 2009 the series continued with The Face As Its Thousand Ships, and now emerges the third installment: The Dirt’s Passion Is Flesh Sorrow. Described by critics as ‘resonant’, ‘striking’, ‘quixotic’, ‘elegant’, ‘ribald’ and ‘jazzy’, Clifford’s sonnets defy categories or boundaries. He is a master of the form and every page is an example of how a great poet can use a complicated structure to achieve depth of thought, beauty and explosive resolutions (or, in many cases, questions). In fact, every poem reinvents the sonnet itself, and, despite all poems sharing the same form, each one is sharply, conclusively differentiated from the others. These are sonnets like you’ve never read before. Clifford often draws on his own life experiences – fatherhood, love, death and uncertainty – but he also has plenty to say about God, pop culture and the foolhardiness of certain current political figures. In the end, though, the collection remains a remarkably cohesive, intelligent and death-defying foray into an ancient form that never knew what hit it.

The book of Isaiah places a distinctive emphasis on the miraculous. It speaks about the miraculous more than any other book of Scripture. Because miracle runs through the whole of the prophecy, careful attention to it, as John Goldingay gives it here, not only unfolds the message of Isaiah but allows the theme to become a detailed commentary on the God of miracles. Miracle is a tricky word, so Goldingay defines what is meant by the miraculous in Isaiah before considering the miraculous features throughout the book: in testimonies to Yahweh's extraordinary communication with people such as prophets, in reminders of Yahweh's extraordinary acts long ago, in reports of the extraordinary acts whereby Yahweh rescues his people within the book's temporal framework, in promises of Yahweh's extraordinary acts of restoration in the future, and in Yahweh's extraordinary acts toward other peoples. What of the miracles of long ago? Did God create the world, devastate it and then start it off again, summon Abraham, deliver Israel from Egypt, drown the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, take the Israelites through the wilderness, dispossess the Canaanites, defeat the Midianites? What about the miracles that come after, including those witnessed in the New Testament--especially the raising of Jesus from the grave? Goldingay points to the interweaving of miracle with narrative in Isaiah itself to provide a clue: these are stories about real events which, with the help of the Spirit of God, have become narratives that captivate and edify.

This book examines key male characters in Luke-Acts with respect to constructions of gender and masculinity in the Greco-Roman world. Of all Luke's male characters, four in particular problematise elite masculine norms: Zechariah (the father of John the Baptist), the Ethiopian eunuch, Paul, and, above all, Jesus. These men do not conform to the strictures of elite masculinity, for they do not protect their bodily boundaries nor do they embody corporeal control.

The Sheik—E. M. Hull’s best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino—kindled “sheik fever” across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically “Oriental” swept through fashion, film, and literature, spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided, tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today’s mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments. Drawing on “high” literature, erotica, and popular romance fiction and films, Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion, abduction by Barbary pirates, sexual slavery, the fear of renegades, the Oriental despot and his harem, the figure of the powerful Western concubine, and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism, decolonization, sexual liberation, feminism, and American involvement in the Middle East on women’s Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers, consumers, and imagined actors; and revised, reversed, or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.