While many Americans dismissed the borough of The Bronx in the late 1970s through the belief that »The Bronx is burning,« this study challenges that assumption. As the first explicit study on The Bronx in American popular culture, this book shows how a wide variety of cultural representations engaged in a complex dialogue on its past, present, and future. Sina A. Nitzsche argues that popular culture ushered in the poetic resurrection of The Bronx, an artistic and imaginative rebirth, that preceded, promoted, and facilitated the spatial revival of the borough.

Through a careful reading of several ancient texts such as Chariton's Callirhoë, Fullmer identifies an ancient storytelling convention with roots in the Homeric tradition in which narratives of death and revival accentuate significant points in a story. In Mark's Gospel, resurrection narratives accentuate the power of Jesus' ministry (Mark 5:21-43) as well as the ironic disloyalty of Jesus' disciples as their failure is first assured (Mark 9:14-29) and later realized (Mark 16:1-18). The reader of this study will come to appreciate how the irony of the Gospel - a literary feature that is prominent in novelistic literature - is furthered by a novelistic application of the resurrection theme. These observations affirm an identification of the genre of the Gospel as novelistic literature. The study also examines themes of death and revival in texts of the Hebrew Bible, revealing a recurrent constellation of motifs. In these texts, Fullmer convincingly traces a Prophetic resurrection topos with characteristics that are compared to an Epic resurrection topos identified in the Homeric tradition. He then demonstrates how the two topoi merge in later, novelistic texts of Hellenistic Judaism such as the Gospel of Mark, witnessing to a widespread amalgamation of cultures that characterizes the Hellenistic period. This study supports a growing appreciation of the ethnic hybridity of the context that produced Mark's Gospel, contributing to the work of scholars who question an often overdrawn dichotomy between Jewish and Greek culture in the Hellenistic period. Moreover, the significant influence of epic, non-biblical traditions upon the Gospel becomes manifest without an assertion of direct dependence upon Homeric epic. Overall, the study provides a model for the examination of specific themes of the Gospel in light of related ancient literature which enhances modern understanding and appreciation of Mark's story.

This title was first published in 2001. Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49) was a powerful poet of the English Romantic period, who has been and is still strangely neglected by critics. His macabre blank verse dramatic writings and his delicately balanced lyrics have both won ardent admirers such as Browning, Gosse, Pound and Christopher Ricks. Yet there are formal and generic problems in Beddoes's writings which continue to marginalize him as merely an eccentric, and the canon of Romanticism seems to have found no place for him.

"Cuban author Jose Lezama Lima (1910-76) produced some of the most enigmatic and important poetry in the Spanish language. He did this during a turbulent moment in Cuban history - a period of social unrest, radical change in political systems, and attempts at cultural self-definition. While some have argued that his poetry evades these circumstances, Assimilation/Generation/Resurrection adopts a contextual approach and reveals the extent of Lezama's engagement with the defining political and cultural issues of his day. It also lays bare the underlying connection of this poetry to a weave of intertexts - Lezama's productive interaction with several traditions." "Intimidating in its philosophical scope and linguistic complexity, Lezama's poetry has received far less critical attention than his prose. The present study rectifies this critical imbalance, foregrounding the poetry while discussing three issues that link disparate areas of Lezama's literary production. These issues - cultural assimilation, generation, and resurrection - are central elements in Lezama's poetics, yet are also pertinent to wide-ranging debates on Latin American cultural identity. This study reads key poems from each of his published books of poetry, using an interpretive approach forged from diverse yet cohering sources, including Lezama's own theories on reading and writing." "After a brief methodological excursus and a first contextualization of Lezama's poetics vis-a-vis a number of other Cuban writers, this study considers Lezama's early assimilation of a number of initiatory texts as well as his indirect but crucial response to the social concerns of the 1930s." "Assimilation/Generation/Resurrection makes clear that Lezama's poetry owes its existence to an engagement with cultural artifacts and social circumstances more generally. Yet it is far more than a response. It constantly attempts to go beyond, generating the new at the intersection of the old and the as-yet uncreated. The result of this practice is a poetry that claims the power both to translate over distance and to resurrect by virtue of the image."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The death and resurrection of Joseph Towards the end of Genesis, the narrative slows down to tell the story of Joseph. There is no dispute that Joseph's story is unique, but why does it deserve such focused attention? And how does this story relate to the rest of Genesis? In Figuring Resurrection, Jeffrey Pulse presents the view that Joseph is a death-and-resurrection- figure. A close literary reading of Genesis 37–50 reveals that Joseph's story is one of rejection and restoration, descent and ascent, condemnation and exaltation, exile and return, death and resurrection. Far from a lengthy diversion, Joseph's story of "death and resurrection" plays an important role in the theology of Genesis and later Second Temple Jewish literature. Figuring Resurrection has implications for our understanding of Joseph's narrative, the book of Genesis, Hebrew thinking on the afterlife, and typology.

This volume brings together key findings of the long-term research project ‘Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective’ (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University). Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in different religious environments and historical periods, in particular in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past. Contrary to standard theories of modernisation, which tend to regard religious individualisation as a specifically modern or early modern as well as an essentially Western or Christian phenomenon, the chapters reveal processes of religious individualisation in a large variety of non-Western and pre-modern scenarios. Furthermore, the volume challenges prevalent views that regard religions primarily as collective phenomena and provides nuanced perspectives on the appropriation of religious agency, the pluralisation of religious options, dynamics of de-traditionalisation and privatisation, the development of elaborated notions of the self, the facilitation of religious deviance, and on the notion of dividuality.