The Literature of Hell

The Literature of Hell PDF

Author: Margaret Kean

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1843846098

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Essays considering the representation and perception of hell in a variety of texts.

Hell in Contemporary Literature

Hell in Contemporary Literature PDF

Author: Falconer Rachel Falconer

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-07-29

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1474468136

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What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? Now available in paperback, this book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering - or discovering - selfhood. In exploring these ideas, this book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray, and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and identity; the ethics of the subject; trauma and memory; descent as sexual or political dissent; the interrelation of realism and fantasy; and Occidentalism and Orientalism.Key Features*Defines and discusses what constitutes Hell in contemporary secular Western cultures*Relates ideas from psychoanalysis to literary traditions ranging from Virgil and Dante to the present*Explores the concept of Hell in relation to crises in Western thought and identity. e.g. distortions of global capitalism, mental illness, war trauma and incarceration*Explains the significance of this narrative tradition of a 'descent to hell' in the immediate political context of 9/11 and its aftermath

The Penguin Book of Hell

The Penguin Book of Hell PDF

Author: Scott G. Bruce

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1524705276

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"From the Bible through Dante and up to Treblinka and Guantánamo Bay, here is a rich source for nightmares." --The New York Times Book Review Three thousand years of visions of Hell, from the ancient Near East to modern America From the Hebrew Bible's shadowy realm of Sheol to twenty-first-century visions of Hell on earth, The Penguin Book of Hell takes us through three thousand years of eternal damnation. Along the way, you'll take a ferry ride with Aeneas to Hades, across the river Acheron; meet the Devil as imagined by a twelfth-century Irish monk--a monster with a thousand giant hands; wander the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno, in which gluttons, liars, heretics, murderers, and hypocrites are made to endure crime-appropriate torture; and witness the debates that raged in Victorian England when new scientific advances cast doubt on the idea of an eternal hereafter. Drawing upon religious poetry, epics, theological treatises, stories of miracles, and accounts of saints' lives, this fascinating volume of hellscapes illuminates how Hell has long haunted us, in both life and death.

Inferno

Inferno PDF

Author: Margaret Kean

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781845119980

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In her rich and wide-ranging book, Margaret Kean tells the history of hell through literature, philosophy, art, music and film.

Tours of Hell

Tours of Hell PDF

Author: Martha Himmelfarb

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1512802778

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From the ancient Book of the Dead to Dante's Divine Comedy, the living have attempted to describe the world of the dead. Tours of Hell focuses on one form of that attempt: the tours of hell found in Jewish and Christian apocalypses of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Himmelfarb examines seventeen texts, preserved in five languages and spanning a thousand years of human history. These include Hebrew texts and Christian texts in Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, and Coptic, such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul family. Muslim texts, medieval visions, and other related literatures are also discussed. Himmelfarb details the common elements of the tour tradition, including such features as a hero or heroine figure, a heavenly revealer, and descriptions of the punishments awaiting those who arrive in hell. She convincingly refutes the accepted nineteenth-century critical view of the earliest of these tours, the Apocalypse of Peter, as a Christian form of an "Orphic-Pythagorean" descent to Hades. She place the work instead on the family tree of the tour apocalypse, a genre she traces back to the third century B.C.E. Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36). Linking the Apocalypse of Peter with later Jewish tours of hell, Himmelfarb reveals significant sin-and-punishment combinations that seem to point to a common source, which she theorizes to be a lost Jewish Tour work of the late Second Temple period. Rich and fascinating texts seldom before brought to light are treated in detail in this pioneering study. A comprehensive work on the apocalyptic tradition, Tours of Hell will be of great interest to scholars and students of religion, history, ancient and medieval literature, and Dante studies.

The History of Hell

The History of Hell PDF

Author: Alice K. Turner

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780156001373

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A survey of how, over the past 4,000 years, religious leaders, poets, painters, and ordinary people have visualized Hell--its location, architecture, furnishings, purpose, and inhabitants.

The Hermeneutics of Hell

The Hermeneutics of Hell PDF

Author: Gregor Thuswaldner

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-15

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 3319521985

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This collection of essays analyzes global depictions of the devil from theological, Biblical, and literary perspectives, spanning the late Middle Ages to the 21st century. The chapters explore demonic representations in the literary works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire, John Milton, H.P. Lovecraft, and Cormac McCarthy, among others. The text examines other media such as the operas Orfeo and Erminia sul Giordano and the television shows Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. The Hermeneutics of Hell, featuring an international set of established and up-and-coming authors, masterfully examines the evolution of the devil from the Biblical accounts of the Middle Ages to the individualized presence of the modern world.

The Encyclopedia of Hell

The Encyclopedia of Hell PDF

Author: Miriam Van Scott

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1999-11-30

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780312244422

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The Encyclopedia of Hell covers the underworld from Dante's Inferno to Gary Larson's "Far Side" cartoons, and includes everything in between. This book offers depictions of Hell from film, television, music, classic literature, religion, visions, contemporary fiction, myth, theater, scholarly works, and art. The first of its kind, this book is an information catalog which provides diverse interpretations of the world to come, as well as lively and entertaining depictions of what possibly awaits us. All in all, it is one hell of a book. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians

Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians PDF

Author: Michael Wheeler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1994-10-13

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 9780521455657

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The Victorians were obsessed with death, bereavement, and funeral rituals, and speculated vigorously on the nature of heaven, hell, and divine judgment. This popular abridgement of Michael Wheeler's award-winning Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology looks at the literary implications of Victorian views of death and the life beyond, and recreates vividly the fear and hope embodied in the theological positions of the novelists and poets of the age. Now accessible to a wide readership, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians offers a wide-ranging and attractively illustrated cultural history of nineteenth-century religious experience, belief, and language in the face of death.