Revisionist historian Jacques R. Pauwels challenges readers to reconsider what they know about some key events in the last 250 years of world history. At a time when it’s all too easy to see history in black-and-white terms, historian Jacques R. Pauwels urges readers to let go of conventional history textbooks and re-examine historical events outside the bounds of conventional ideologies and agendas. Pauwels uses twelve key events, from the French Revolution onwards, to debunk well-known accepted historical narratives in the western canon. He challenges readers to rethink their views by compiling the recent work of specialized scholars whose research demonstrates that the facts contradict the myths that have been offered to explain these events. Beginning with a reconsideration of the impacts of the French Revolution, Pauwels finishes by dismantling the American narrative surrounding the use of nuclear weapons in the Second World War and the real rationale for the Cold War and the U.S.’s postwar global democracy project.

This study gives substantial coverage and close critical attention to a wide range of Coetzee's published writings, in the attempt to situate his oeuvre within the framework of both postmodernist and postcolonial theory and criticism. In addition, it links the political and social aspects of Coetzee's work, its South African provenance and its often oblique engagement with contemporary issues, with formal questions regarding structure, rhetoric and narrative strategies as tackled in his novels. By approaching Coetzee's fiction from a variety of critical angles and taking into account both the transformations in the socio-political context of South Africa, and the recent changes in critical reception (exemplified by the Nobel Prize he was awarded in 2003) this book therefore offers a thorough assessment of the author's oeuvre.

An intriguing exploration of the enduring significance of the world's great myths--from the dawn of time to the present day As ancient as speech, as essential as law, myths are the stories we tell to find our identity in the cosmos. It is through mythology that we attempt to unravel not only the meaning of our actions and impulses but the significance of human existence itself. Now in Living Myths, classical scholar J. F. Bierlein explores the enduring patterns and messages of myths from every culture. Myths, writes Bierlein, are "the eternal mirror in which we see ourselves." Living Myths delves behind the mirror and brings to light the imperishable and transcendent forces common to the myths of the world. Juxtaposing myths of fathers and sons--the Greek myth of Athamas and Phrixus, the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, the Algonquin tale of Grandfather, Father, and Son--Bierlein uncovers essential lessons about human nature and divine will. In the Indian story of Nala and Damayanti, the Greek legends of Aphrodite, and the haunting Irish tale of Etain, Bierlein examines the transforming mystery of romantic love. Here too are tales of the world's great heroes--the Greek Theseus, the Irish Cuchulainn, and the Mexican Quetzalcoatl--and their common desire to break through the masks of appearances. Steeped in wisdom, brimming with insights into human nature and behavior, Living Myths is a luminous exploration of the meaning of mythology through the ages and today in each of our lives.

This book, first published in 1990, summarizes and evaluates the contribution of Martin Buber as a theorist of myth. Buber provides explicit guidelines for understanding and evaluating myths. He describes reality as twofold: people live either in a world of things, to which they relate as a subject controlling its objects, or in a world of self-conscious others, with whom one relates as fellow subjects. Human beings require both types of reality, but also a means of moving from one to the other. Buber understands myths as one such means by which people pass from I-It reality to I-You meeting. In studying myths, he focuses on the myths in the traditions he knows best, but offers his advice and interpretation of mythology and scholarship about mythology generally.

Sir Karl Popper, the great philosopher, said, The real mystery in life is that the universe itself seems to be creative. This book is an introduction to creativity with an essay on the connection between faith and fiction. It contains a few of the authors favorite ancient cultural myths, some folktales of recent times, and some original stories. These are ideal for reading to children. This book includes stories for families from our ancestors great and unknown; some are contemporary individualistic doodles in the sands of time that readers may simply enjoy. All of us should be telling the stories of our imaginations for the sake of our children and future generations, not only for their pleasure but wherein they might find a way forward through the mysteries and changes in life. The book has commentaries on the myths and finishes with an explanation of the purpose of myths that concludes with a challenge for modern myth making.

"Myths of Venice is concerned not only with the official iconography of state per se, but with the ways in which such imagery resonates within a culture, the ways in which visual motifs acquire an aura of association and allusion dependent upon a network of shared values and habits of interpretation."--BOOK JACKET.

An accessible introduction to the complex topic of Myth. Ellwood examines theories, meanings and interpretations, all of which are structured around a typical programme of study.

This book explores modern representations of the Black Death, a medieval pandemic. The concept of cultural memory is used to examine the ways in which journalists, writers of fiction, scholars and others referred to, described and explained the Black Death from around 1800 onwards. The distant medieval past was often used to make sense of aspects of the present, from the cholera pandemics of the nineteenth-century to the climate crisis of the early twenty-first century. A series of overlapping myths related to the Black Death emerged based only in part on historical evidence. Cultural memory circulates in a variety of media from the scholarly article to the video game and online video clip, and the connections and differences between mediated representations of the Black Death are considered. The Black Death is one of the most well-known aspects of the medieval world, and this study of its associated memories and myths reveals the depth and complexity of interactions between the distant and recent past.

Therapists can broaden their point of view and expand their options for treating individuals, couples, and families by understanding family myths. Here is a thorough and unique compilation of current studies on the development, evolution, and clinical implications of family myths. An outstanding group of international experts offers a variety of formulations regarding both personal and family myths in an attempt to bridge the chasms between individual, couple, and family systems dynamics. They focus on the conscious and unconscious elements of families’shared perceptual experiences and their relationship to behavioral, interactional patterns of individuals, couples, and family systems. The detailed descriptions of various clinical approaches to re-editing clients’personal, conjugal, and family myths will be enormously helpful to clinicians, theorists, trainers, and educators.

In all cultures and at all times, humans have told stories about where they came from, who they are and how they should live their lives. 'Myths and Mythologies' brings together the key classic and contemporary writings - philosophical, psychological, sociological, semiological and cognitivist - on myth. To the insider, myths contain truth, revelation and a 'history of ourselves'; to the outsider, a culture s myths can be seen as the product of foolish, infantile and wishful thinking. Myths tell us about specific cultures, about human creativity, and how narrative shapes and reflects understanding. The 'Reader' is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in the impact of narrative on human culture and the meaning of truth in religious language.