The Labyrinths Of Love

Labyrinths of Love is an interdisciplinary examination of the self, psyche, and soul, providing a comparative analysis from religious, paranormal research and transpersonal theory perspectives. The book addresses ontological questions regarding the nature of the self in relationship to both psyche and soul, each differentiated to reveal attributes that are transphysical and commonly recognized in most religious traditions. The role of dreams, imagination, and paranormal perceptions, as well, contribute to a more fully realized sense of identity. A constructive use of pansentient ontology illuminates how human identity can incorporate transphysical aspects of self into a meaningful theory of self-development and evolutionary becoming.The work creates a unique synthesis that unfolds what it means to be human and demonstrates a visionary epistemology of the self.

This book studies the various narrative shades of love in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. It examines writings by Isabel Allende, Roberto Arlt, García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The author provides a close textual reading of each novel and discusses how humans make sense of their lives through love. He shifts the focus of these writings from political violence and historical disillusionment to the illusion of love. An important contribution to Latin American literary criticism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, history, Latin American literature, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, comparative literature, and sociology.

“Hailed as the Prince of Poets of the French Renaissance, Pierre de Ronsard composed a rich body of love poetry that has captivated audiences and challenged scholars for many centuries through its undulating, liquid forms and powerful metamorphic imagination. Blending oneiric fantasy and mythological profusion . . . this poetry appeals to readers steeped in the classical tradition and receptive to an esthetic of vitality and abundance rather than the brooding self-pity more characteristic of Petrarchism. This new translation captures the essence of a poetic legacy whose exuberance and emotion can still be deeply felt today.” —Eric MacPhail, author of Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment: Atheist's Progress “Ronsard is a towering figure in the history of European poetry, but his work is little read these days other than in the form of single-line quotations. Henry Weinfield has made a substantial selection that reflects different aspects of Ronsard’s immense output from his earliest love-sonnets to his death-bed meditations. Translating sixteenth-century French poetry into English verse while remaining close to the original is a formidable task, but Weinfield’s sensitivity and ingenuity are equal to the challenge: he has found an idiom which both retains the flavor of the Renaissance and remains fluent and transparent to modern ears. The French text is provided on facing pages so that even those unfamiliar with early modern French will be able to explore the original. This is an important act of cultural transference that will give Ronsard’s extraordinary poetic imagination a new lease of life for readers of the twenty-first century.” —Terence Cave, Emeritus Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Research Fellow, St John's College “First came Henry Weinfield’s irreplaceable versions of Mallarmé in 1994, and now comes a second masterpiece of translation with this new selection of Ronsard. Weinfield has a supernatural talent for rendering the most difficult poets into clear, cadenced, and beautiful English. The man is a wizard.” — Paul Auster, Editor, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

Why is love so difficult? Is there such a thing as a soulmate? Why can't I find someone to love me just the way I am? Why does the person I gave my heart to in the early days now feel so distant or even dangerous? When love goes bad, is there a way to turn things around? If we lost each other along the way, can we find each other again? In the wake of betrayal, can trust ever be rebuilt? In this helpful and enlightening book, expert couples therapist, Dr. Chelsea Wakefield, explains why couples who begin with such hopeful expectations become disenchanted, withdraw into self-protection or become entangled in unresolvable conflicts. She provides step by step guidance out of these shadowlands, and teaches six essential "love capacities” any couple can develop that will open the path to a soulful, enduring relationship.

Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geographical writings generate metaphors in which the labyrinth signifies admirable complexity, while poetic texts tend to suggest that the labyrinth is a sign of moral duplicity. She then describes two common models of the labyrinth and explores their formal implications: the unicursal model, with no false turnings, found almost universally in the visual arts; and the multicursal model, with blind alleys and dead ends, characteristic of literary texts. This paradigmatic clash between the labyrinths of art and of literature becomes a key to the metaphorical potential of the maze, as Doob's examination of a vast array of materials from the classical period through the Middle Ages suggests. She concludes with linked readings of four "labyrinths of words": Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's House of Fame, each of which plays with and transforms received ideas of the labyrinth as well as reflecting and responding to aspects of the texts that influenced it. Doob not only provides fresh theoretical and historical perspectives on the labyrinth tradition, but also portrays a complex medieval aesthetic that helps us to approach structurally elaborate early works. Readers in such fields as Classical literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, comparative literature, literary theory, art history, and intellectual history will welcome this wide-ranging and illuminating book.

In 1999 England, Olivia and Alison enter a labyrinth in Talcott Forest, thinking it would be fun to make believe. But they travel back in time to 1586 England to the estate of Geoffrey Talcott and his younger brother Lord Nicholas. After sparking suspicion of witchcraft, Olivia and Alison search for a way home, lest they lose themselves to the past and their hearts to the dashing Talcott brothers.

The Visionary Queen affirms Marguerite de Navarre’s status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of nonschismatic reform but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and its institutions perpetuated against women. We also see evidence that she used her literary texts, especially the Heptaméron, as an exploratory space in which to generate a creative vision for institutional reform. The Heptaméron’s approach to reform emerges from statistical analysis of the text’s seventy-two tales, which reveals new insights into trends within the work, including the different categories of wrongdoing by male, institutional representatives from the Church and aristocracy, as well as the varying responses to injustice that characters in the tales employ as they pursue reform. Throughout its chapters, The Visionary Queen foregrounds the trope of the labyrinth, a potent symbol in early modern Europe that encapsulated both the fallen world and redemption, two themes that underlie Marguerite's project of reform.