A survey of an award-winning author's extensive corpus written across a broad range of genresWalter Mosley is perhaps best known for his first published mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress, which became the basis for the 1995 movie of the same name featuring Denzel Washington. Mosley has since written more than forty books across an impressive expanse of genres including, but not limited to, nonfiction, science fiction, drama, and even young adult fiction, garnering him...

Exploration and analysis of the innovative screenplays and novels by an award-winning playwrightUnderstanding Suzan-Lori Parks is a critical study of a playwright and screenwriter who was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Suzan-Lori Parks is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, a Whiting Writers Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, two Obie Awards, and a Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. In this bo...

Greek Nymphs: Myths, Cult, Lore is the first comprehensive study of the nymph in the ancient Greek world. This well-illustrated book examines nymphs as both religious and mythopoetic figures, tracing their development and significance in Greek culture from Homer through the Hellenistic period. Drawing upon a broad range of literary and archaeological evidence, Jennifer Larson discusses sexually powerful nymphs in ancient and modern Greek folklore, the use of dolls representing nym...

Understanding Greek Religion is one of the first attempts to fully examine any religion from a cognitivist perspective, applying methods and findings from the cognitive science of religion to the ancient Greek world. In this book, Jennifer Larson shows that many of the fundamentals of Greek religion, such as anthropomorphic gods, divinatory procedures, purity beliefs, reciprocity, and sympathetic magic arise naturally as by-products of normal human cognition. Drawing on evidence f...

This collection of new essay examines how authors of the 20th and 21st centuries continue the use of sentimental forms and tropes of 19th century literature. Current literary and cultural critical consensus seems to maintain that Americans engaged in a turn-of-the-century refutation of the sentimental mode; an analysis of 20th and 21st century narratives, however, reveals an ongoing use of sentimental expression that draws upon its ability to instruct and influence readers through their em...

Using archaeological, epigraphic, and literary sources; and incorporating current scholarly theories, this volume will serve as an excellent companion to any introduction to Greek mythology, showing a side of the Greek gods to which most students are rarely exposed.Detailed enough to be used as a quick reference tool or text, and providing a readable account focusing on the oldest, most widespread, and most interesting religious practices of the ancient Greek world in the Archaic a...

"Wonderful…a thoughtful discussion of what made [the Greeks] so important, in their own time and in ours." —Natalie Haynes, IndependentThe ancient Greeks invented democracy, theater, rational science, and philosophy. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. Yet this accomplished people never formed a single unified social or political identity. In Introducing the Ancient Greeks, acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall offers a bold sy...

This review of Western history's disdain for "savage" tribes across three millennia is "a provocative contribution to multicultural studies" ( Publishers Weekly).From one of the world's leading experts on Native American law and indigenous peoples' human rights comes an original and striking intellectual history of the tribe and Western civilization that sheds new light on how we understand ourselves and our contemporary society.Throughout the centur...

"There is something of a paradox about our access to ancient Greek religion. We know too much, and too little. The materials that bear on it far outreach an individual's capacity to assimilate: so many casual allusions in so many literary texts over more than a millennium, so many direct or indirect references in so many inscriptions from so many places in the Greek world, such an overwhelming abundance of physical remains. But genuinely revealing evidence does not often cluster coherently...

Roman towns and their history are generally regarded as being the preserve of the archaeologist or the economic historian. In this famous, unusual and radical book which touches on such disparate themes as psychology and urban architecture, Joseph Rykwert has considered them as works of art. His starting point is the mythical, historical and ritual texts in which their foundation is recounted rather than the excavated remains, such texts having parallels not merely in ancient Greece but al...

Balancing the Books represents a sophisticated examination of the ongoing engagement of American literature with the economies of slavery through the works of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Both Faulkner and Morrison write about the relationship between race, identity, and history, and about how the legacies of slavery linger in the lives and actions of their characters, although the narrative strategies through which they render these themes ultimately diverge. Dussere bring...

There is more material available on Herakles than any other Greek god or hero. His story has many more episodes than those of other heroes, concerning his life and death as well as his battles with myriad monsters and other opponents. In literature, he appears in our earliest Greek epic and lyric poetry, is reinvented for the tragic and comic stage, and later finds his way into such unlikely areas as philosophical writing and love poetry. In art, his exploits are amongst the earliest ident...