Part-goat, part-man, Pan bridges the divide between the human and animal worlds. In exquisite prose, Paul Robichaud explores how Pan has been imagined in mythology, art, literature, music, spirituality and popular culture through the centuries. At times, Pan is a dangerous, destabilizing force; at others, a source of fertility and renewal. His portrayals reveal shifting anxieties about our own animal impulses and our relationship to nature. Always the outsider, he has been the god of choic...

Stories of the Stones explores how ancient monuments – standing stones, megaliths and earthworks – have been reimagined across the centuries in folklore, literature, art and popular culture. From medieval myths to Romantic fascination and from folk-horror cinema to Julian Cope, the powerful stories inspired by these enigmatic sites reflect the beliefs and anxieties of each era. Spanning Britain, Ireland and Brittany, the book includes iconic places such as Stonehenge and Newgrange...

A selection of previously unpublished spiritual reflections by Fr. Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers.

T. S. Eliot was raised in the Unitarian faith of his family in St. Louis but drifted away from their beliefs while studying philosophy, mysticism, and anthropology at Harvard. During a year in Paris, he became involved with a group of Catholic writers and subsequently went through a gradual conversion to Catholic Christianity.Many studies of Eliot's writings have mentioned his religious beliefs, but most have failed to give the topic due weight, and many have misunderstood or misrep...

Explore the Hero's Journey in stories as old as humanity and as new as last night's dreamThe latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change. — Joseph CampbellSince its release in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faceshas influenced millions of readers by combining the insights of modern psycholog...

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling.But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how ...

From the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet and critic: "A lovely book, full of joy and wisdom." — The Baltimore SunHow to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry, feeling, and human nature. In language at once acute and emotional, Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can make a difference. In a marvelous reading of verse from around the world, including wo...

A brilliant, ambitious, insightful inquiry into the art of writing from the legendary Margaret Atwood.What do we mean when we say that someone is a writer? Is he or she an entertainer? A high priest of the god of Art? An improver of readers' minds and morals? Looking back on her own childhood and the development of her writing career, Margaret Atwood addresses the riddle of her own art.Her wide-ranging reference to other writers, living and dead, is accompa...

From wicked queens, beautiful princesses, elves, monsters, and goblins to giants, glass slippers, poisoned apples, magic keys, and mirrors, the characters and images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers and audiences, both adults and children, for centuries. These fantastic stories have travelled across cultural borders, and been passed on from generation to generation, ever-changing, renewed with each re-telling. Few forms of literature have greater power to enchant us and rekind...

Explore the power of myth as it exploded from medieval Europe into the modern worldIn this fourth volume of The Masks of God — Joseph Campbell's major work of comparative mythology — the pre-eminent mythologist looks at the birth of the modern, individualistic mythology as it developed in Europe beginning in the twelfth century A.D. up through the modernist art of the twentieth century.The Masks of God is a four-volume study of world religion and m...

A major addition to the literature of poetry, Edward Hirsch’s sparkling new work is a compilation of forms, devices, groups, movements, isms, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore—a book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to over and over.Hirsch has delved deeply into the poetic traditions of the world, returning with an inclusive, international compendium. Moving gracefully from the bards of ancient Greece to the revolutionaries of Latin A...

Many are familiar with Joseph Campbell's theory of the hero's journey, the idea that every man from Moses to Hercules grows to adulthood while battling his alter-ego. This book explores the universal heroine's journey as she quests through world myth. Numerous stories from cultures as varied as Chile and Vietnam reveal heroines who battle for safety and identity, thereby upsetting popular notions of the passive, gentle heroine. Only after she has defeated her dark side an...