{"title":"The Writing on the Wall","authors":"T. W. Thompson","doi":"10.5840/renascence201971312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/renascence201971312","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Dickens, considered by many the poet laureate for the poor and downtrodden of his time, had a great fondness for \"religious and moral themes.\" As a result, \"one does not have to read very far in either the major or minor works of Dickens to learn lessons contained in both the New and Old Testaments.\" Among his favorite biblical allusions are examples of the many hard \"lessons\" visited upon the rich and the powerful by a just God. One of the author's most resonating Old Testament references is to the \"great feast\" of King Belshazzar, the sixth century B.C. ruler of Babylon who loved gold and silver more than people, more than life itself. Allusions, subtle and otherwise, to this self-destructive tyrant appear—with telling effect—in several of Dickens's best-known novels, from A Christmas Carol to A Tale of Two Cities.","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82188348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Be Not Afeared”","authors":"Ahmet Süner","doi":"10.5840/renascence201971313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/renascence201971313","url":null,"abstract":"This paper looks at the thematic and rhetorical variations of a fundamental fear that frequently surfaces in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the fear of illegitimate birth, which may also be understood as the fear of non-contractual sexuality. Sycorax is the prominent supernatural figure that the play deploys to depict unpredictable, indeterminate and horrible acts of creation unsanctioned by society. The paper shows how the fear of illegitimate birth not only shapes entire characters such as Sycorax and Caliban, but also infiltrates the language and figures that prevail in Prospero’s orchestrations of the marriage plot, his betrothal masque and his deployment of Greco-Roman mythologies (Hymen, Venus and Cupid). This fear is also connected with the play’s other fears and desires evoked in Gonzalo’s anarchist utopia and in the play’s preoccupations with the issue of legitimate government. The focus on the fear of illegitimate birth and non-contractual sexuality connects the different plot elements and rhetorical devices used in the play in a novel way, providing a plausible explanation for Prospero’s burst at Caliban in the masque scene and foregrounding (and hence doing justice to) the long-neglected figure of Sycorax.","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83004335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vocation and Enclosure in Colonial Nuns’ Spiritual Autobiographies","authors":"Teresa Hanckock-Parmer","doi":"10.5840/renascence201971311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/renascence201971311","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the discourse of enclosure utilized by Maria de San Jose (1656-1719, Puebla), Jeronima Nava y Saavedra (1669-1727, Bogota), and Francisca Josefa de Castillo (1671-1742, Tunja, Colombia) in their spiritual autobiographies. Despite dissimilar personal vocation narratives, these Hispanic nuns embraced enclosure as a tool of continuing spiritual advancement, both before and after actual profession of monastic vows. They portrayed the cloister simultaneously as connubial bedchamber and isolated hermitage, thus ascribing Baroque religious meaning to ancient anchoritic models through intersecting discourses of desert solitude, redemptive suffering, Eucharistic devotion, and nuptial mysticism. To attain ideal enclosure for self and others, these nuns advocated for reform in New World convents, which often reproduced worldly hierarchies, conflicts, and values. Enclosure, more than a symbolic vow or ecclesiastical mandate, constituted a formative practice that fostered correct action and attitude in nuns’ lives; these women conscientiously sought a cloistered life through which they cultivated holiness and created new spiritual meaning.","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78524077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Love and Friendship in The Merchant of Venice","authors":"David N. Beauregard","doi":"10.5840/RENASCENCE20197129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/RENASCENCE20197129","url":null,"abstract":"The basic argument of the essay is that in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare represents Aristotelian-Thomistic notions of love and friendship. In the attraction of Bassanio for Portia we have the three-fold analysis of love as desire for the useful, the pleasurable and the virtuous. In the male friendship between Antonio and Bassanio we see the liberal man’s virtuous desire to give and share his wealth with his friends. Both relationships are concerned with giving and taking, a reflection of the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between love as desire and love as friendship. A final note is the play’s conclusion in the Aristotelian goods of happiness, gratuitous good fortune with the safe arrival of Antonio’s ships, union in friendship and marriage with Portia and Bassanio, Nerissa and Gaziano, and the wonder and delight that is to follow with Portia’s answer to all remaining questions.","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89649173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Introduction to Owen Barfield’s The Unicorn","authors":"Jeffrey Hipolito","doi":"10.5840/RENASCENCE20197126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/RENASCENCE20197126","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:p />","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83905342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Solidity of the Self","authors":"M. Melfi","doi":"10.5840/RENASCENCE20197128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/RENASCENCE20197128","url":null,"abstract":"In A Passage to India, E.M. Forster examines the duality of three main characters, Mrs. Moore, Aziz, and Fielding and thereby demonstrates their relative stability in the primordial chaos of India. Unlike Adela who falls apart after her experience in the cave, these characters draw on the power of the imagination in a grappling struggle to remain morally centered when facing the darkness within. Forster suggests that turning to the East (where the Marabar caves represent darkness and destabilization) contrasts with returning to the West (where imaginative form represents order and light). In Mrs. Moore, Aziz, and Fielding, Forster examines the manner in which one might embrace a centered life committed to empathy for others by way of facing one’s own otherness. As these characters immerse themselves in India’s primordial formlessness and acknowledge their shadows, they embrace imaginative form rather than fall apart, and in doing so they serve as models of mythmakers and relative stability.","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83160635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Realism","authors":"M. Ascari","doi":"10.5840/RENASCENCE20197111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/RENASCENCE20197111","url":null,"abstract":"A complex and controversial novel, Atonement is at the core of a lively critical debate, opposing those who focus on the impossibility of Briony’s atonement – also in relation to the author’s atheist views – to those who conversely explore the redemptive quality of her “postlapsarian” painful self-fashioning. Far from concerning simply the destiny of a literary character, this debate has to do with the impact Postmodernist relativism has on both the conception of the human subject and the discourses of the past, from memory to history and fiction. Discarding any potentially nihilistic interpretations of Atonement as disempowering, this article delves into Ian McEwan’s multi-layered text in order to comprehend its ambivalences, its subtle investigation of the human condition, and its status as a postmemory novel reconnecting us to the events of World War Two.","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89573362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Most Important Virtue?","authors":"J. Pittman","doi":"10.5840/RENASCENCE20197114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/RENASCENCE20197114","url":null,"abstract":"The narrator of the Middle English Cleanness states that God punishes sexual sin more harshly than any other sin. This essay argues that the rest of the BL Cotton Nero A.x manuscript continues to develop the virtue of temperance, which governs sexual behavior, as a central theme. Pearl uses temperance to bring home the dreamer’s sin and God’s justice, while Patience and SGGK employ the interrelation between temperance and fortitude in ways that make temperance foundational. Interrogating the interdependence of the virtues allows the poet to challenge the traditional hierarchy of virtues, in which temperance is the lowest, thus making the case that temperance is paradoxically foundational to other virtues, like justice and fortitude. In this way, the poems not only make a case for the value of temperance, but they also expose ambiguities in orthodox accounts of the virtues.","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87522089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"HISTORICAL COLLATION","authors":"Wendell W. Broom","doi":"10.4324/9780429025211-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429025211-4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76797728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘There was something gentlemanly about your painting’","authors":"Mark J. Zunac","doi":"10.5840/RENASCENCE20197127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/RENASCENCE20197127","url":null,"abstract":"While criticism of Evelyn’s Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited has generally focused on the novel’s Catholic themes, it has often overlooked the author’s exploration of certain correlative artistic values that that are both sustained by the Christian vision and integral to the development of a humane and soul-enriching culture. That culture for Waugh was necessarily grown out of an identifiable past and evoked by artistic representations of divine grace and human potential. This essay argues that Charles Ryder’s eventual Catholic conversion remains indispensable to the novel’s fulfillment of its author’s vision. This critical denouement, however, also serves to affirm the grace that is revealed throughout by the protagonist’s instinctive veneration for traditions besieged by a soulless and secular modernism. In this way, worldly beauty is intricately entwined with a life of virtue and can thus be seen as adjacent to those values hitherto singularly ascribed by critics of Brideshead to the Catholic mission.","PeriodicalId":41054,"journal":{"name":"RENASCENCE-ESSAYS ON VALUES IN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72810299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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