Kirjahaku

This title was first published in 2003. This text explores the "dark, pessimistic truth that pervades the pages of modern texts", setting a theme of Dante's "Inferno" against the work of modern authors including Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Conrad, Wharton, Kafka, Camus, Waugh and Flannery O'Connor. The author's thesis is that these writers exhibit a hostility towards the reader, an anger that the reader should continue to be so deludedly happy when the writer has become so mortifyingly enlightened. At its most characteristic, Reilly demonstrates, modern fiction seems to achieve a savage satisfaction in inflicting this pain, to an extent that could be described as sadistic. Reilly traces what he calls this "punitive spirit" to a character in the "Inferno", Vanni Fucci, who suffering himself does his best to make Dante suffer too. Through the study he uses the "Inferno" as a guide to the prevailing attitudes in modern fiction, revealing a parallel between the prohibition of pity within the medieval poem and in the pages of modern texts.

This title was first published in 2003. This text explores the "dark, pessimistic truth that pervades the pages of modern texts", setting a theme of Dante's "Inferno" against the work of modern authors including Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Conrad, Wharton, Kafka, Camus, Waugh and Flannery O'Connor. The author's thesis is that these writers exhibit a hostility towards the reader, an anger that the reader should continue to be so deludedly happy when the writer has become so mortifyingly enlightened. At its most characteristic, Reilly demonstrates, modern fiction seems to achieve a savage satisfaction in inflicting this pain, to an extent that could be described as sadistic.

Bills of Mortality: Disease and Destiny in Plague Literature from Early Modern to Postmodern Times explores the dynamic between the fact of plague and the constructs of destiny deadly disease generates in literary texts ranging from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. The volume is of interest to readers in both literary and scientific, especially medical, fields. In addition, it serves as an accessible introduction to plague literature and to the arena in which it has evolved since ancient times. To undergraduate and graduate students, Bills of Mortality affords an opportunity for scholarly engagement in a topic no less timely now than it was when plague struck Milan in 1629 or ravaged Venice in 1912 or felled Thebes in antiquity.

Revision with unchanged content. Social movements are not created in a vacuum. The nature of the political system in which social movements operate influences the strategies chosen by leaders. The question becomes why do some leaders chose to remain peaceful, working through the existing political structure and why do some choose to become violent? In systems that have an independent judiciary, numerous electable ideologies and a federal system of government leaders of social movements are encouraged to work through the system to accomplish their goals. In systems that do not have these characteristics, social movements must work outside the system, often times aiming to destroy the existing political system in the process. Achieving their goals is not possible in the current environment. This book is a closer examination of those dimensions, through a comparative case study of the African-American Civil Rights movement in the United States and the Catholic Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland.