Eros And Psyche Routledge Revivals

How does Victorian fiction represent personality? How does it express emotion and how does it imagine the mind? These questions stand at the centre of Eros and Psyche, first published in 1984. In examining how three authors – Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot – depict the mind and organise emotion, Chase approaches their works as expressive structures, and analyses their struggle to accommodate rival imperatives in depicting personality: desire and duty, guilt and innocence, love and autonomy. The title begins with Brontë’s early Angrian tales, which introduce the problem that unifies the book: the attempt of Victorian fiction to escape the constraints of the romance mode, while assimilating its energies. There follow readings of The Pickwick Papers, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and Middlemarch, in the light of such problems as confinement and exposure in Brontë, tragic doubt in Dickens, and the image of the moral mind in George Eliot.

First published in 1933, this study, which underwent revision in the 1960s, is a comprehensive survey of the verse of English nineteenth-century poets whose work appeared after 1860. A special feature is the full and critical treatment of minor writers. In no other book is their work so carefully evaluated. There is a full account of the minor Pre-Raphaelites, of James Thomson, the poet of The City of Dreadful Night, of Henley, Stevenson and George MacDonald. John Davidson is the subject of a long and revealing study. Evans suggests that poetry from the late nineteenth century is neglected in scholarly study, and that Victorian Romanticism deserves more attention than it has recently received.

Originally published in 1992, this remarkable book challenges many of the assumptions governing the Sociology of Religion and the Sociology of Culture by arguing that Western religion is neither science nor morality - it is the promise of happiness. Learned and incisive, it will be essential reading for students of religion, culture and anyone interested in the character of Modernity.

First published in 1971, Professor Knight’s book draws analytic attention to poets including Tennyson, Masefield, and Brooke, who are shown to hold a dimension of meaning previously ignored or misunderstood. Homage is paid to John Cowper Powys as one of the foremost seers of the modern age. A comprehensive review of the work of Francis Berry claims to establish him as our foremost living poet. Professor Knight urges, and goes far to prove, that modern literary criticism up until the 1970s failed to touch upon the richer meanings of contemporary literature – he stresses the relation between such acclaimed poets as Yeats and Eliot and the spiritualistic movements of contemporary times. Knight regards youth-revolts as a sign of a healthy dissatisfaction with an irreligious and directionless culture, and believes that hope lies in the neglected powers pressing for acceptance.

The Eros and Psyche myth has, over the course of the twentieth century, received nearly as much attention from depth psychologists as has the Oedipus story. In their attempt to better understand this popular story, scholars have proposed various interpretations, which have generally followed eithether Freudian or Jungian theories about the nature of the psyche and its development. This elaborate work provides serious students of psychology, religion and mythology with a detailed account and analysis of what has been accomplished in the spychological interpretation of the Eros and Psyche myth to date. It emphasizes how psychological theory determines the direction of interpretation much more than does the literary context of the myth itself. It also examines the strengths and weaknesses of these psychological interpretations (five Freudian and six Jungian) of the Eros and Psyche myth in order to lay the groundwork for an interpretation which (1) avoids the rigidity of both Freudian and Jungian dogma and (2) restores the myth to its rightful literary and religious context — something which has been ignored by most psychological interpretations.

This 1994 book asserts that the experience of development differs along gender lines.

G. A. Gaskell’s Dictionary of the Sacred Language of All Scriptures and Myths, first published in 1923, examines several different aspects of religion, including examples from Ancient Egyptian religion and mythology to modern-day Christianity, providing explanations of gods, events, and symbols in alphabetical order. This is a perfect reference book for students of theology or the history of religion.