The Persistence of the Soul in Literature, Art and Politics

Editeur : Palgrave Macmillan Cham
Parution : 2024-01-09 10:38:25

Publication | Table des matières | Critiques

Résumé

This book analyses the evolution of literary and artistic representations of the soul, exploring its development through different time periods. The volume combines literary, aesthetic, ethical, and political considerations of the soul in texts and works of art from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, spanning cultures and schools of thought. Drawing on philosophical, religious and psychological theories of the soul, it emphasizes the far-reaching and enduring epistemological function of the concept in literature, art and politics. The authors argue that the concept of the soul has shaped the understanding of human life and persistently irrigated cultural productions. They show how the concept of soul was explored and redefined by writers and artists, remaining relevant even as it became removed from its ancient or Christian origins.

Table des matières

1 Introduction. Rewriting the Soul: The Persistence of a Concept
Jacques Arènes, Delphine Louis-Dimitrov, Estelle Murail
pp. 1-26
Part I Writing the Soul
2 Egyptian Souls in Victorian Minds: The Transmigration of the “Ka” in Egyptianising Fiction
Nolwenn Corriou
pp. 29-47
3 E. S. Dallas’s Literary Theory: The “Hidden Soul” and the Workings of the Imagination
Thalia Trigoni
pp. 49-66
4 “You Haven’t Let Me Call My Soul My Own”: Soul, Psyche and the Thrill of Nothingness in May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life
Leslie de Bont
pp. 67-82
5 Spectrality and Narrative Form in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo
Stefanie Weymann-Teschke
pp. 83-99
6 Forging in the Smithy of David Foster Wallace’s Postmodern Soul
Béatrice Pire
pp. 101-115
Part II The Aesthetics of the Soul
7 Transmutations of the Soul: Anima and Her Heart in Christopher Harvey’s School of the Heart (1647)
Émilie Jehl
pp. 119-136
8 Let Us Go Forward: The Soul, Spiritualism, and the Funerary Commemoration of Richard Cosway, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Evelyn De Morgan
Cherry Sandover
pp. 137-153
9 Dancing the American Soul: Secular and Sacred Motifs in the Choreographic American Renaissance
Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau
pp. 155-175
10 Casting the Soul: Antony Gormley’s Sculptures
Coralie Griffon
pp. 177-196
11 Sweet Soul Music
Adrian Grafe
pp. 197-209
Part III The Ethics and Politics of the Soul
12 Colliding Circles: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concept of the Soul Between Spiritual Self-Realization and Materialistic Expansion
Olga Thierbach-McLean
pp. 213-228
13 “Souls on Board”: A Counter-History of Modern Mobility
Susan Zieger
pp. 229-242
14 African American Women’s Literary Renaissance: A Template for Spiritual Fiction in the Twenty-First Century?
Claude Le Fustec
pp. 243-258
15 Persisting Souls in a Persisting Myth: Appropriation and Transmigration in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013)
Claire Wrobel
pp. 259-274

Critiques

  • “This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
    – Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK
  • “The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
    – Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course