Paradoxes Of Paradise

As a child, Katia Barnes has a recurring nightmare. In the dream, she is a young Victorian woman, alone in a dark house at twilight, desperately searching for something. She is caught by surprise by a man with a pistol. A chase ensues, and she is killed. Katia wakes up in terror, knowing she has just experienced this woman´s death. The dream eventually fades away, but always remains in the back of her mind. Katia becomes a romance novelist, and after churning out the same book thirty times over, becomes disenchanted with her chosen genre. Her father dies, leaving her an unexpected legacy; an old Rosedale mansion left to him by a mysterious, unknown aunt. Immediately upon seeing the house, Katia recognizes it as the same one from her childhood dream. The Victorian house is named Eden. Inspired by its sense of mystery, Katia moves in, and starts renovations, planning to open a Bed and Breakfast. Soon, she finds out what she has in fact inherited is a former Victorian brothel. Katia also finds a trunk full of diaries, written by a woman named Adela, who lived in the house from 1899 to 1912. Katia starts reading the diaries, becoming obsessed with them. Adela was born in Cairo, Egypt, the illegitimate daughter of a British newspaper correspondent, and an Egyptian bellydancer. Her mother dies when she is a small child, and she and her brother are taken to England by their father. Victorian London is not kind to Adela, she is considered "half-African", and shunned. As a young woman, Adela journeys to Canada to start a new life. On board the ship, she meets Doctor Anthony Maxwell, a wealthy Canadian businessman, who has a unique philosophy based upon ancient Egypt. They fall in love, deciding to marry upon their arrival in Montréal. However, Adela gets more than she bargained for. Not only is Maxwell bisexual, he also has a sideline providing "courtesans" for Toronto´s elite. Katia is engrossed by the diaries, and discovers many unusual features in the house; a secret passageway, for one. Strange paranormal experiences begin to happen. Katia calls upon her friend Raine, who is a psychic. Raine advises Katia that it is her "Karma" to clean up a mess from the past, and in doing so, she will find her own life will be changed for the better. The diaries lead Katia on a mystical journey of discovery, unveiling her family´s hidden past. Adela´s story reveals many "dirty secrets" of Victorian/Edwardian Toronto; a world of extremes in both wealth and poverty, widespread narcotics use, racism, and the many problems and struggles faced by women. The Paradox of Paradise is rich in substance, covering a spectrum of life topics; history, philosophy, love, heartache, sexuality, and the paranormal. Through a strange journey, the two heroines´ lives become intertwined. Katia solves most of the mystery, except for the most important part; who killed Adela, and why? The answer comes in an ending with a twist, which does indeed change Katia´s life. Katia discovers the meaning of "The Paradox of Paradise".

Rabbi Akiba is famously reported to have said, 'Heaven forbid that any one in Israel ever disputed that the Song of Songs is holy, for the whole world is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies'. This book is an extended elaboration of Rabbi Akiba's statement. It argues that the Song is a Hellenistic composition, drawing on the resources of ancient Near Eastern erotic poetry and characterized by a complex though fragile unity. Through the metaphors, the lovers progressively see themselves reflected in each other, as well as in the world about them and the poetry of love. The poem celebrates the land of Israel in spring, an ideal humanity, and a perfected language. It culminates in the contestation of love and death, and the assertion that only love survives the exigencies of time. The pervasive ambiguity of the Song, in which one never quite knows what happens, is related to the ambivalence of beauty, which is closely related to ugliness. Hence the surrealist imagery of the Song verges upon the grotesque and stretches the resources of our imagination. Through a detailed comparison with the Garden of Eden story, Landy argues that the Song is a vision of paradise seen from the outside, through the ironic poetic gaze, in a world potentially hostile or indifferent.

The first comprehensive study of the Song of Songs' use of military metaphors Although love transcends historical and cultural boundaries, its conceptualizations, linguistic expressions, and literary representations vary from culture to culture. In this study, Danilo Verde examines love through the military imagery found throughout the Song’s eight chapters. Verde approaches the military metaphors, similes, and scenes of the Song using cognitive metaphor theory to explore the overlooked representation of love as war. Additionally, this book investigates how the Song conceptualizes both the male and the female characters, showing that the concepts of masculinity and femininity are tightly interconnected in the poem. Conquered Conquerors provides fresh insights into the Song's figurative language and the conceptualization of gender in biblical literature.

Paradoxia Epidemica is a broad-ranging critical study of Renaissance thought, showing how the greatest writers of the period from Erasmus and Rabelais to Donne, Milton, and Shakespeare made conscious use of paradox not only as a figure of speech but as a mode of thought, a way of perceiving the universe, God, nature, and man himself. The book consists of an introduction (historical and topological) and sixteen chapters grouped according to broad types of paradox: rhetorical, theological, ontological, epistemological. Within this framework the author interprets individual writings or art forms as parts of a rich tradition. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This groundbreaking book, which builds on the author's earlier work in "On Gendering Texts," studies how, by what means and to what extent human love, desire and sex, and possibly even 'sexuality', are gendered in the Hebrew Bible. Following a classification and gendering of the linguistic and semantic data, the investigation looks into the construction of male and female bodies in language and ideologies; the praxis and ideology of sex, procreation and contraception; deviation from socio-sexual boundaries (e.g. incest, rape, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution); eroticism and "pornoprophetics." Finally, the work discusses some of the wider sociological and theological implications of the findings.

In this masterful new study of the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs, Elaine T. James explores the Song's underlying interest in the natural world. Engaging with the fields of geography, landscape architecture, and literature, James critiques the tendency of scholars to reify a perceived dichotomy between "nature" and "culture" and instead argues that the poetic attention to landscape indicates an awareness of a viewer. Nature is here a poetic device that informs James's close-readings of agrarianism, gardens, cities, social control, and feminism and the gaze in the Song. With this two-fold emphasis on landscape and lyric, Landscape of the Song of Songs shows how the Song persistently envisions a world in which human lovers are embedded in the natural world, complexly enfolded in relationships of fragility and care.

This volume is the first in a series which provides a fundamental resource for feminist biblical scholarship, containing a comprehensive selection of essays, both reprinted and specially written for the series, by leading feminist scholars.